Thursday, 29 June 2017
Volume 723
Sitting date: 29 June 2017
THURSDAY, 29 JUNE 2017
THURSDAY, 29 JUNE 2017
Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Prayers.
Business Statement
Business Statement
Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Leader of the House): When the House resumes on Tuesday, 4 July, the Government will look to complete the Land Transfer Bill and the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Bill, and to progress a number of other bills on the Order Paper. On Thursday morning, the House will sit under extended hours for the second readings of the Rangitāne Tū Mai Rā (Wairarapa Tāmaki nui-ā-Rua) Claims Settlement Bill and the Ngāti Pūkenga Claims Settlement Bill, and the first reading of the Ngāti Tamaoho Claims Settlement Bill.
Oral Questions
Questions to Ministers
Housing Market—Commentary
1. PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister for Building and Construction: Does he agree with Mainfreight founder and Chairman Bruce Plested that housing is a “social disgrace”, that the market cannot sort out this problem, and that real leadership and intestinal fortitude is needed now?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): I agree with Mr Plested’s full statement on housing, which identified the three main problems. Firstly, planning restrictions make it difficult to increase housing within city boundaries, which we have addressed through Auckland’s new unitary plan. Secondly, he cites the problem of the metropolitan urban limit restricting growth outwards, which we have addressed through the special housing areas and the Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms. Thirdly, he highlights the problems of funding infrastructure, in which we are about to announce $1 billion in support for councils. Ironically, the member opposed all of the measures that Mr Plested has fought for.
Phil Twyford: If he agrees with Bruce Plested that the urban growth boundary has stopped Auckland growing, why has the Government twice voted against Labour’s amendments to abolish the urban growth boundary—amendments that have been supported by every other party in this House?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Well, the member’s claim is simply not true. The metropolitan urban limit was abolished with the new Auckland Unitary Plan. This Government has put in place the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, which specifically prohibits there ever again being the metropolitan urban limit. I would draw the member’s attention to the fact that the metropolitan urban limit had legal effect only when the majority of his colleagues voted for the 2004 RMA amendment bill that actually blocked Auckland’s housing growth.
Phil Twyford: If he agrees with Bruce Plested that part of the problem is a lack of finance for infrastructure, why has he done nothing to reform infrastructure financing, except offer Auckland Council debt that by law it cannot take on?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Because the member is simply wrong. In 2012 this Government changed the local government amendment Act to provide greater flexibility about the funding of infrastructure and, specifically, to provide for the private sector to be able to partner for the provision of that infrastructure. It is this Government that has provided the billion dollars for the Housing Infrastructure Fund; and, ironically, this Government has just passed an RMA reform bill that changes the way in which infrastructure is funded, which that member voted against.
Phil Twyford: If he will not take Bruce Plested’s word for it, does he perhaps agree with Kim Campbell of the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) when he calls for a large-scale housebuilding programme and says that the Government’s current plans are not working?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I note that Auckland has had 6 straight years of increasing house construction. That has never occurred at any time previously in history. In fact, the last 6 years of the previous Labour Government saw a decline in the number of houses that were built in every single year. The simple view is this: if you want more houses, vote National. If you want less construction, vote for the nobs on the other side.
Dr Shane Reti: When were the urban limits that Mr Plested describes as a social disgrace put in place, and how has the Government removed them?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The Auckland metropolitan urban legal limit bit in Auckland with the passage of the Resource Management Amendment Bill in 2004, which said that regional plans trumped district plans. That saw new home construction drop from 7,000 to just under 3,000, to the lowest level ever in 2008. We have systematically dismantled that Auckland limit with the special housing areas, the new Auckland Unitary Plan, our RMA forms, and the new urban development national policy statement. This has reopened the pipeline of new home construction, and we now have building activity at the highest level ever in Auckland.
Phil Twyford: Rather long answer, Mr Speaker?
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I will decide that. But if the member is going to ask another supplementary question, I would be grateful if he then listened to the answer, rather than just interjecting.
Phil Twyford: If he will not take the word of the country’s leading business people on this, will he accept the word of 72 percent of New Zealanders, who say that the Government is simply not doing enough to control the housing market?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: If there is a social disgrace, as Mr Plested refers to it, I think it would be a party purporting to care about the standard of housing, then putting cheap foreign labour into substandard, overcrowded housing. That, certainly, is a social disgrace.
Economic Programme—Family Incomes Package and Performance
2. JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth) to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received on real after-tax wages rising in New Zealand?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): Average after-tax wages have increased 33 percent, while consumer prices have increased only 14 percent, since December 2008. This compares with the period between 1999 and 2008, where New Zealanders’ real after-tax earnings improved by just 5 percent over that entire period. Furthermore, from 1 April next year Kiwis will benefit from the $2 billion Family Incomes Package in Budget 2017, which increases after-tax pay and provides additional income-related support. The Government’s strong economic plan is helping New Zealanders get ahead, whether it is helping people raise their kids or saving for a house.
Jonathan Young: How else will the Family Incomes Package benefit New Zealand families?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The four elements to the Family Incomes Package in Budget 2017, when taken together, are expected to reduce the number of children living in families receiving less than half of the median income by around 50,000, or almost one-third. That is just in one package. It is truly hard to believe that the largest Opposition party voted against the Family Incomes Package. This year’s Budget builds on Budget 2015’s $790 million package to reduce hardship amongst children in New Zealand’s poorest families by, amongst other things, boosting the main benefit rates for families with children by $25 a week—the first increase in 40 years.
Jonathan Young: How has the minimum wage increased in recent years compared with inflation?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Since 2008 the minimum wage has increased from $12 per hour to $15.75 per hour, which, for a full-time worker on a minimum wage, means their annual income has increased 31 percent, from just over $25,000 a year to $32,850 a year, currently. This is a real increase in the take-home pay of minimum wage workers, because, again, inflation has been only 14 percent over this period, compared with the increase of 31 percent. In addition, the economy is currently adding 10,000 new jobs a month, with New Zealand recording the highest employment rate in our history amongst adults, and the second-highest employment rate in the whole of the OECD.
Jonathan Young: What other reports has the Minister seen on wages and employment conditions in New Zealand?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Just before coming down to the House today I saw a report that called for improvements to wages and conditions, and it claimed a small number of bad employers were undercutting good employers. It also called for more labour inspectors. I agree with some of the concerns in the report. In fact, I have seen recent examples of a bad employer taking advantage of foreign workers, exploiting them by housing them in substandard conditions, paying well below market wages—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! That question, as I now listen to the answer, conflicts quite seriously with Speaker’s ruling 197/6—that question was designed for no purpose other than to attack the Opposition.
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I do think it is an important issue—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I hope the Minister is not attempting to argue with me when I have just given a ruling. That would be very serious. I could get exceptionally grumpy.
Schools, Canterbury—Closures and Mergers, Ombudsman’s Report, and Student Well-being
3. CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) to the Minister of Education: Will she apologise on behalf of the Government for the flawed handling of the Canterbury school mergers and closures after the 2011 earthquakes; if not, why not?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Associate Minister of Education) on behalf of the Minister of Education: I am advised that she has personally liaised with the Ombudsman on his findings and committed to learning relevant lessons from his report. It is the intention of the Minister of Education and the Secretary for Education to meet with Canterbury schools. This is likely to be in August but could be earlier, depending on when people are available. In this meeting, she also intends to personally apologise for the initial mishandling of the communications to schools, to reiterate the previous Minister’s apology, and to listen to any ongoing concerns of schools as a result of the report. It is also her intention to update the schools on the $1.137 billion Canterbury rebuild programme and the working group that is being established to work on guidelines for future mergers and closures. I am advised that in addition to changes the Ministry of Education has already made to its merger and closure process, the Minister has asked it to work with civil defence expertise to ensure that appropriate lessons have been learnt regarding the ministry response and the recovery from the major earthquakes.
Chris Hipkins: Does she agree with the editorial in the Press that stated that her predecessor “became notorious in Christchurch for a stubbornness and insensitivity that bordered on arrogance.”; if not, why not?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: What I will say is that the former Minister apologised in person—community by community, school by school, face to face, to the people who counted. She was also responsible for ensuring $1.139 billion of investments to make sure we have the most modern learning environments for the learners and schoolchildren in Canterbury.
Chris Hipkins: Why was student well-being and mental health not regarded as a pervasive factor by the Government when deciding whether to merge or close schools, and does she now agree with the Press editorial that it added to the impression of bureaucratic heartlessness and cold inflexibility?
Mr SPEAKER: There are two supplementary questions there. The Minister can address one or the other.
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: As I have said, the Minister and the ministry intend to meet with Canterbury schools to talk about what other opportunities there are to already changed processes around mergers and closures, to look at what else has to occur. But I will remind the House and remind that member that the series of earthquakes had a devastating impact across the region, across the country. No one had prepared for them. No one could have anticipated them. I think the Ministry of Education did an extraordinary job under very, very challenging circumstances.
Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question that I asked the Minister was around why the Government did something at the time, not what about it is doing in the future.
Mr SPEAKER: No, I am not going to assist the member at this stage. It was quite a convoluted question, and there were actually two parts to the question. There should really be only one. As far as I am concerned that question has been addressed.
Chris Hipkins: What additional support will she now put in place given the Ombudsman’s finding that the impact of the trauma caused by the earthquakes and the ensuing social upheaval on young children’s learning and behaviour is becoming more evident as time passes?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: The ministry has made a number of changes to improve its processes generally as a result of the lessons learnt from the devastation in Canterbury. In addition to the Ombudsman’s report, there is further work that is occurring in terms of what else can occur and, very importantly, it is working closely with the civil defence emergency teams, because it is a wider response than just the Ministry of Education. There is a significant amount of work that has gone on, and continues to go on, in supporting the children in Christchurch.
Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. My question was quite specific about the additional support for youth mental health as a result of the earthquakes—
Mr SPEAKER: On this occasion I am going to invite the member to repeat his question.
Chris Hipkins: What additional support will she put in place given the Ombudsman’s finding that the impact of the trauma caused by the earthquakes and the ensuing social upheaval on young children’s learning and behaviour is becoming more evident as time passes?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: I said—if the member had listened to the answer that I gave to the first question—very clearly that the Minister of Education and the Secretary for Education are going to be in Christchurch, talking to Canterbury schools. They will be listening to any ongoing concerns they have, and I would expect that there might be changes as a result of those conversations.
Chris Hipkins: Does she think that telling the House today that the Ministry of Education handled the process exceptionally well given the circumstances is somewhat in contradiction with her statement that the Minister is now going to apologise, and in contradiction with the fact that the Ministry of Education has apologised for a process that is widely regarded as wrong and adding to the trauma that people had already experienced?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: As I have said, there has been an apology already made for the process that had occurred—
Dr Megan Woods: You said you did it well.
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: No, I said in my supplementary answer to the question the member raised, that there was a set of exceptional circumstances and challenges in Canterbury. In this instance, the report has found that there were some areas that were not done well, for which apologies have been given, and further work is ongoing. So I would appreciate that the member should take that into consideration.
Housing, Rental—Methamphetamine Contamination Standard Changes
4. ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua) to the Minister for Building and Construction: What progress has the Government made in improving the tenancy laws and guidance for dealing with the problem of methamphetamine testing and contamination?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): Today’s new standard for meth testing and decontamination is a huge step forward for homeowners and tenants dealing with this problem. It sets clear standards for sampling and testing, and competency requirements for both samplers and decontamination contractors. It complements the legislative proposals introduced last month in the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill (No 2), which gives landlords the right to test and enables tenancy agreements to be terminated when levels are unsafe. The intention is to reference the standards and regulations to provide a comprehensive solution to this problem. I want to acknowledge both the member and Alastair Scott for their advocacy in this area and the work they did on a member’s bill to similarly address this problem.
Andrew Bayly: How do the new standards compare with the old guidelines, and what impact will this have on housing supply and the cost of decontamination?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The standards committee looking in depth at the science and the health risk has concluded that the 0.5 microgram per 100 square centimetres limit was excessively cautious. The old guidelines were based on the risks associated with clandestine laboratories rather than use. The new 1.5 micrograms per 100 square centimetres standard will mean hundreds fewer homes will have to be vacated and will save millions in unnecessary decontamination work. There is no single magic answer to the pressures in the housing market, but this is just one of dozens of sensible regulatory changes that the Government is making to improve how housing is regulated.
Andrew Bayly: How was the new standard for dealing with methamphetamine contamination funded?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: This new standard was funded from the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act, which this Government passed in 2009. This early reform by this Government, opposed by parties opposite, required that offenders contribute to addressing the problems that are caused by their crime. Property owners of meth-contaminated homes are often innocent and further victims of drug crime. It is entirely appropriate that this new standard has been funded from criminal proceeds.
Phil Twyford: Now that the Minister has acknowledged that the old methamphetamine contamination standard was, in his words, “excessively cautious” and is about to be replaced with a new standard, what is the Government going to do about the $30 million that Housing New Zealand has wasted based on the faulty methamphetamine standard, the hundreds of families that were evicted from their homes, and the hundreds of State houses that have been left vacant around the country for years in the middle of a housing crisis—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Bring the question to a conclusion, please.
Phil Twyford: —because of this Governments incompetence?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Such decisions on an issue like chemical contamination need to be based on the best science of the time. I would remind the member that Labour members of Parliament 5 years ago were asking what the Government was doing to get people out of P-contaminated houses. The Government set up the standards process 18 months ago. We have now found a good quality standard that ends up—and the difficulty for the Labour Party members is that they spend half the time arguing that we were not doing enough to get people out of P-contaminated houses, and then argue when we put a new standard in place.
Emergency Housing—Motel Purchases and State Housing Sales
5. CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston) to the Associate Minister for Social Housing: What motels has the Government purchased in response to the increased emergency housing demand, and how much has this cost?
Hon ALFRED NGARO (Associate Minister for Social Housing): I would like to thank the member for the opportunity to speak about this innovative new transitional housing approach, which is making a real difference to the lives of New Zealanders. The Government has purchased two motels and, in the next few days, will settle the purchase of a further two motels. These motels will provide warm, dry, and safe transitional housing for those in need. That is helping 220 families. The total cost of those two settled purchases is $4.8 million.
Carmel Sepuloni: Supplementary question. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! If we had less response coming from my right, then I could assist.
Carmel Sepuloni: How does he reconcile the purchase of a motel in Gisborne that provides 19 emergency housing spaces with a loss of 62 State houses in the area, and would it not make more sense to provide long-term State housing than short-term emergency motel accommodation?
Hon ALFRED NGARO: What would make sense is providing accommodation for the needs of those—even in that area. Motels accommodate large numbers of people in multiple units, located centrally, and are often close to other services that are provided.
Carmel Sepuloni: How does he reconcile the purchase of a motel in Blenheim that provides 17 emergency housing spaces with the loss of 29 State houses in the area, and would it not make more sense to provide long-term State housing rather than short-term emergency motel accommodation?
Hon ALFRED NGARO: I do not know all the details of that motel, but what I can say about that motel—it is still in the early stages. The negotiations are still in place.
Carmel Sepuloni: How does he reconcile the recent purchase of one emergency housing space in the Hawke’s Bay with the loss of 137 State houses in Napier alone, and is he looking into the purchase of two more motels for emergency accommodation use to make up for the shortfall?
Hon ALFRED NGARO: I can confirm for the member, as was in a press release last week, that there are two purchases. These are still to be settled in the Bay of Plenty area. Those will be purchased very soon, and those settlements should be made in the next few days.
Carmel Sepuloni: Will he admit that if his Government had not reduced the number of State houses by 2,500, then his Government would not need to spend $100,000 a day putting homeless New Zealanders up in motels?
Hon ALFRED NGARO: What I would admit to is that this is the first Government, in the 2016 Budget, that has committed $354 million to emergency housing—the first Government that has made a commitment around housing in the Housing First initiative, which I know the member actually supports.
Todd Barclay—Southland Electorate Office Allegations, Ministerial Conduct
6. RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements on the Clutha-Southland electorate office issue even if facts known to him make doing so extraordinarily difficult?
Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility, I call the Hon Steven Joyce on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Prime Minister: Those statements were not made in his capacity as Prime Minister.
Ron Mark: With regard to recent comments made by him in the media relating to texts sent by the former Minister of Finance that read “Everyone unhappy”, other than the Prime Minister, who else was he talking about?
Mr SPEAKER: Again, in so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility—the Hon Steven Joyce on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Those statements were not made in his ministerial capacity.
Kris Faafoi: Different phone, was it?
Ron Mark: Good point. Since 18 May, can he categorically say that no current or former Minister has listened to the recording Mr Barclay offered to play to him, which allegedly talks about sex and illicit drug use?
Mr SPEAKER: Again, in so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility, the Hon Steven Joyce, on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I doubt that any member would have been listening to that in their ministerial capacity.
Ron Mark: How can New Zealanders have confidence in a Prime Minister who, in his role as Deputy Prime Minister, told the media he had no knowledge of any tape, only to be countered shortly thereafter by the then Prime Minister, who told the media: “I only know what Bill told me.”?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I think the public can have confidence not just in the Prime Minister but in his Government. Indeed, they regularly show that they do have that confidence, and, of course, they will have the opportunity to reconsider that confidence and decide whether they continue with it in September. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will just stand and ask his questions without that unnecessary introduction.
Ron Mark: Thank you, Mr Speaker—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have made my point to the member. It does not need to be reinforced by members on my right-hand side.
Ron Mark: Will the Prime Minister go on Hansard to confirm that when the former Minister of Finance confirmed the use of the National leader’s budget to settle a former staff member’s privacy breach, it had a parliamentary purpose and that such payment was compliant and legal?
Mr SPEAKER: Order! That question is completely out of order and conflicts with Speaker’s ruling 173/1.
Budget 2017—Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Offenders and Victim Support
7. MAUREEN PUGH (National) to the Minister of Corrections: How is Budget 2017 investing in rehabilitation and reintegration outcomes for offenders?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Minister of Corrections): Budget 2017 will invest $18.6 million over 4 years to expand industry, treatment, and learning programmes for offenders. The Government is committed to reducing reoffending through interventions that are aimed at addressing the drivers of crime. We want offenders to be better equipped for life in the community when they come out. Corrections will expand four of its most effective programmes: education, alcohol and drug treatment services, intensive rehabilitation for violent offenders, and reintegration support for offenders when they leave prison. These programmes will reduce further offending and the subsequent harm to both individuals and communities.
Maureen Pugh: What results has the Government’s investment in rehabilitation and reintegration delivered?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: We have made great strides in helping offenders to get the life skills they need to turn their lives around. Corrections will invest around $190 million in rehabilitation and reintegration this year. That is a 60 percent increase since 2008. The total number of offenders in a rehabilitation programme has risen, from 9,300 in 2008 to over 33,500 this year. That represents an increase of around 260 percent. The September 2016 Better Public Service targets results show a 4.4 percent reduction in reoffending and a 26 percent reduction in the number of reoffenders. This means there have been over 9,400 fewer offenders and almost 38,000 fewer victims of crime since 2011. We will continue to invest in rehabilitation and reintegration programmes with the goal of breaking the cycle of reoffending.
Mahesh Bindra: What is Budget 2017 providing to the victims of crime, or is the Government interested only in the rights of prisoners?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: This Government is clearly, through the Better Public Service targets, reducing the number of crimes against people, and clearly that is focused on victims, because we want fewer of them.
Mahesh Bindra: What assurance can she give victims of serious and sexual assaults that their interests will be put before criminals’?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: Since we came into office in 2008, there have been a raft of measures we have put in place to support victims. As I said in my answer, the fact that we have been focused on reducing reoffending—we have 38,000 fewer victims of crime. If that is not a result, I do not know what is.
Drinking-water Contamination—Havelock North
8. Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) to the Minister of Local Government: Does she agree with the Prime Minister’s answer yesterday that drinking-water contamination in Havelock North was “about local government performance and overseeing ratepayer-funded assets whose purpose is to deliver clean and healthy water to its local people. The extensive inquiry into that incident was warranted by widespread illness in the area … it is about local body performance in overseeing their clean water system”?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Local Government): Yes. Stage 1 of the inquiry into the Havelock North water contamination, commissioned by the Attorney-General, identified that whilst no single organisation was at fault, there were a number of shortfallings in the way councils undertook their duties in relation to drinking-water management. That is why I have written to all councils and mayors setting out my expectations that they carry out their obligations to provide a safe and clean water supply to their residents, to the highest standards. Whilst I have no responsibility for it, stage 2 of the findings will provide a wider view of the systems that surround the supply of drinking water.
Hon David Parker: Does she agree with the inquiry finding that the district council did not implement the high standard of care required of a public drinking water supplier, particularly in light of its history of a high number of prior E. coli transgressions?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Yes. The inquiry found that several parties—the regional council, the Hastings District Council, and the drinking-water assessors—failed to adhere to the high levels of care and diligence necessary to protect public health.
Hon David Parker: Does she recall that after the Cave Creek tragedy, the local Department of Conservation manager resigned, the chief executive of the Department of Conservation resigned, and the Minister of Conservation resigned, thereby taking responsibility for the organisation that they were responsible for?
Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be ministerial responsibility, the Hon Anne Tolley.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I have no ministerial responsibility.
Hon David Parker: Does she believe that the mayor of the district council that infected 5,500 of its residents with campylobacter, causing premature deaths, Guillain-Barré paralysis, and terribly painful reactive arthritis, amongst other complications, was responsible for the council he has led for more than 15 years?
Mr SPEAKER: Well, again, in so far as there may be some ministerial responsibility—
Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. If you are implying that the Minister of Local Government does not have responsibility to offer an opinion as to whether the mayor of a district council is responsible for the institution he has led for 15 years, I think that is an inappropriate hint for you to give the Minister.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am just pointing out that the Minister, under Speaker’s ruling 176/2, has no responsibility for operational activities or the decision making of the local authority. I am not saying the question is out of order, and have never attempted to. I am just calling the Minister to answer in as far as she may have ministerial responsibility.
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Supplementary question, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: No, no. I need the answer first of all, if the Minister wishes to answer.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I repeat that the inquiry found that the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, the Hastings District Council, and the drinking-water assessors all failed to adhere to the high levels of care expected. But it also made the point that none of the faults, omissions, or breaches of standards directly caused the outbreak.
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Has the Minister seen the statements from Opposition parties last year saying that the water contamination in Havelock North was caused by intensive dairying, when, in fact, the inquiry found that it was not intensive, that it was sheep—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The latter part of the question is completely unnecessary. The first part of the question was “Has the Minister seen such statements?”. I am prepared to let that part stand.
Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Minister is not responsible for statements by Opposition members of Parliament.
Mr SPEAKER: The question did not ask whether she was; it simply asked whether she had seen statements. I have said that that part can be answered.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Yes, I have seen those statements, and to date I have seen no apology for getting it so absolutely wrong.
Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Just to be clear, if we ask Ministers, about matters for which they are not ministerially responsible, whether they have seen statements—for example, statements by backbench National Party members of Parliament—will that be deemed to be acceptable?
Mr SPEAKER: I rule on everything on a case by case basis as I see fit at the time, as I always have.
Hon David Parker: Does the Minister believe it is appropriate that the mayor who has been in charge of that council for the last 15 years has not taken proper responsibility for the institution by resigning, but rather is seeking election to this Parliament for her party?
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The fact that a former mayor is seeking election to Parliament has got nothing to do with ministerial responsibility.
Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] The member will resume his seat. If the member wants to raise a point of order, he is perfectly entitled to do so, unless it is a point of order that sets out to argue against a decision I have made.
Hon David Parker: It is one thing for the Government members to stand and say they do not think there is responsibility; it is another thing for you to do that for them.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have ruled the question out of order. I am saying there is no ministerial responsibility for the fact that a former mayor wants to stand for this Parliament. That is the end of the matter. The member might not like the way I have dealt with the question, but it is not up for debate. Does the member—[Interruption] No, I am not—[Interruption]
Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I just want to be absolutely clear—because I can see a course of action being charted here—that if the member wants to raise a fresh point of order on any matter, I am only too happy to hear it. But if the member is going to continue to argue and relitigate a decision I have made, I will be asking the member to leave the Chamber.
Hon David Parker: My fresh point of order is that when you did not like the question from the Hon Nick Smith you said: “Stick to the first part of the question, delete the second part.”; in respect of mine, you just rejected the whole of my question, rather than just the end. I expect fair treatment across the House.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will now leave the Chamber. [Interruption] The member will leave the Chamber. That is a direct reflection on the Speaker of this Parliament.
Hon David Parker withdrew from the Chamber.
Catherine Delahunty: Does the Minister think regional councils would benefit from having a charge on water bottlers that was in part—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I apologise to the member. I am having trouble hearing the question because of chatter coming from my left. I will ask the member to start the question again.
Catherine Delahunty: Does the Minister think regional councils would benefit from having a charge on water bottlers that was in part returned to them to help manage and clean up local water sources?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I have no responsibility for that part of the drinking-water regulations, and I suggest the member direct it to the appropriate Minister. I would say, however, that that matter has been referred to a technical task force to consider.
Catherine Delahunty: Does she think it is wise for councils to allow stock grazing close to drinking water bores?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: What I would say is that up and down the country, I am well aware of the huge investment that the farming sector has put into preventing stock from entering into waterways.
Catherine Delahunty: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I think she may have misheard my question. I did not ask about waterways; I said water bores.
Mr SPEAKER: I think that has been addressed in the answer that was given by the Minister.
Catherine Delahunty: Will the Minister support my bill to make aquifers and other drinking-water sources a matter of national importance in the Resource Management Act so that councils can manage them properly?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No.
Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Could you indicate to the House—if a question contains a component that is in order and a component that is out of order, on what basis do you make the decision as to whether or not the Minister should be invited to address the part of the question that is in order? We seem to have had two examples of that today. In one example the Minister was invited to address the part that was in order, and in another question he was not.
Mr SPEAKER: I cannot—there is no set template by which I operate. I judge everything as it occurs at the time, depending on the decorum and the tone of the House. I do my best to be absolutely fair. The issue with regard to Mr Parker was not the question he raised; he just continued to argue with me. I warned him not to but he did not hear my advice.
Wellington—Disaster Preparedness
9. BRETT HUDSON (National) to the Minister of Local Government: What recent announcements has she made regarding Wellington’s resilience to natural hazards?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Local Government): This week, along with Minister Guy, we were pleased to announce a $12 million fifty-fifty partnership to shore up the Wellington region’s water resilience through funding 22 new community water stations throughout Wellington, Porirua, Upper Hutt, and Lower Hutt. Wellington City is unique, in the sense that it does not have its own water supply—nor does Porirua—and with the increased risk of seismic activity following Kaikōura, this was seen as a necessary project. It is a fantastic example of central and local government working together to address an extremely important issue. I am proud to be part of a Government that has delivered a strong and growing economy, which means we have the ability to partner in great initiatives like this.
Brett Hudson: How will this investment futureproof Wellington’s water resilience?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Access to safe, healthy water is absolutely essential after a disaster. Parts of the Wellington region could be without tap water for up to 100 days following a major earthquake, as a result of damage to the water supply network and potential access difficulties. This new investment will ensure that adequate temporary water supplies are available in the end of a major disruption until the bulk supply can be restored. The 22 new local bore and stream-fed emergency water hubs are expected to be completed in the next 12 months. However, Wellingtonians should always be prepared and have water stored at home.
Brett Hudson: What will this mean for residents in Wellington in the event of a major event?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The goal of this work is that there will be an improved level of service for the supply of emergency water, which will mean that no one will have to walk more than 1 kilometre, or 500 metres in hilly areas, to collect water. More than 300 water bladders will be purchased and stored at the water stations, which can be transported into communities in the event of a major disaster, giving people access to clean and safe drinking water.
Transport, Auckland—Rail to Airport
10. JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) to the Minister of Transport: Will the Government start building rail to the airport sooner if Auckland hosts the next America’s Cup regatta or will Aucklanders still have to wait 30 years?
Hon Simon Bridges: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I will stand corrected, but that is not the question that I had.
Mr SPEAKER: It is certainly the question that I have got. I will invite the member to repeat the question again. There appears to be some confusion, but that is the question that I have.
Julie Anne Genter: Will the Government start building rail to the airport sooner if Auckland hosts the next America’s Cup regatta or will Aucklanders still have to wait 30 years?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Transport): I think the position is that, actually, we need to get on with protecting a separate sole-purpose route right now. We also need to then get on with doing the construction. I think it is difficult to say exactly what the time frame is, because, for example, on the route protection there is quite an intricate legal process that needs to be gone through, with a notice of requirement that may take it into 2019.
Julie Anne Genter: Given that airport rail has been the No. 1 transport priority for Aucklanders for over 7 years while he has been in Government, why has it taken so long to show some leadership and get on to starting the project?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I respectfully disagree with the member. The three projects that have been Auckland’s clear priorities for some time have been the City Rail Link (CRL), the East-West Link, and the Auckland-Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative. The Government is involved, certainly, in the first two of those, and has worked very hard on them. All of that said, I think we are not wedded to any one mode. We want to see it all happen, and that is why we are investing so significantly in our biggest city.
Julie Anne Genter: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I think the Minister may have misheard my question. I was talking about priorities for Aucklanders, not his Government.
Mr SPEAKER: No. There was lot in the question, and the Minister said he just did not agree with it.
Julie Anne Genter: Why is airport rail not a priority for his Government and a project of national significance, given its importance to the city and to the country as a whole?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I do not agree with what the member is saying, actually. We are prioritising this by getting on and protecting the route—a separate, sole-purpose route from Auckland CBD through to the airport—right now. That is a complex and actually quite expensive process, and then we are going to get on with doing this. The issue of moving from rapid bus transit to rail is one that has got to be driven by the demand and the numbers that we see on this corridor, but we are getting on and doing the work that is required.
Julie Anne Genter: In that case, will he commit to having airport rail or mass transit open by 2021, when Auckland hosts APEC and the next America’s Cup?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I commit absolutely to progressing this matter quickly, which involves the route protection, first, on a very significant corridor, and then getting on and doing the construction to have mass public transport on that. I think in terms of mode we have got to work through that and see how that goes. I would say, though, I know the member is very wedded to rail over roads. Actually, in this Government we have seen the most significant investment into metropolitan rail in Auckland ever, whether that is the electrification of rail at $1.7 billion or the biggest public transport project ever, the CRL, which we are making very strong progress on.
Julie Anne Genter: Does he acknowledge that the number of people using Auckland’s trains has far exceeded his Government’s expectations when it was still delaying the start of the City Rail Link, and it is highly likely that the same thing will happen to rail to the airport—therefore, we should start building it as soon as possible?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Well, I think they have exceeded everyone’s expectations, and that is because we invested $1.7 billion in electrification at the start of our Government. That is why we are investing, with Auckland and ourselves, $3.4 billion in the biggest public transport project this country has ever seen, CRL. We have invested hugely in transport infrastructure, including public transport. It is a record this Government and, I think, New Zealanders should be very proud of indeed, because it is making a real—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Bring the answer to a conclusion.
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: —difference.
Julie Anne Genter: Why is a motorway in Warkworth a major priority and project of national significance for his Government when it is carrying just 13,000 vehicles each day, when light rail to the airport would move that many people in less than 3 hours?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Firstly, we are investing in all of those things. I mean, that is why we are protecting the route on this corridor—that is very important, I agree with the member. Secondly, I say what she says is insulting to the people of the north. They deserve, actually, a highway that gets them closer to the capital of commerce, Auckland. They deserve the really game-changing, nation-building work we are doing on that road of national significance. It will make a massive difference not just to the north but to New Zealand.
Julie Anne Genter: Why will his Government not adopt the approach that has worked so well for Team New Zealand, set an ambitious goal to have rail to the airport open by 2021, and then work together and take the steps to make it happen, like the Green Party would?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I think when it comes to transport infrastructure this is the most ambitious Government New Zealand has seen in many, many decades—$11 billion through the Crown over the next 4 years, some $32.5 billion going into public transport, into roads, and into rail. I think New Zealanders are noticing, with all of the construction that is happening at the moment.
Police Resourcing—Police Workplace Survey 2017
11. STUART NASH (Labour—Napier) to the Minister of Police: Does she have any concerns about any of the results of the New Zealand Police Workplace Survey 2017; if so, what in particular?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children) on behalf of the Minister of Police: No. This is the eighth year this survey has been undertaken, and, overall, the organisation’s results remain fairly static. Of course, there are always areas in which we could improve, and the additional $500 million this Government is putting into Police in this year’s Budget will go a long way to help.
Stuart Nash: Does she think the fact that her Government has funded 285 fewer police than the police themselves said they needed to “make a dent in serious crime” is the reason why over 50 percent of police do not believe that their contribution is valued, according to the workplace survey?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No. The Budget process is long and contested, but this Government has invested $500 million extra in Police.
Hon Steven Joyce: 10 percent increase.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: A 10 percent increase, the Minister of Finance says. I think New Zealand is fortunate to have such a highly committed police service.
Stuart Smith: What reports has the Minister seen about the help available for police doing what can be a stressful job?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: In yesterday’s The Timaru Herald, I saw there was an article there saying that South Canterbury police believe they have good support systems in place. They are receiving more relevant training than ever before, driven by constant changes or improvements in technology. One the senior officers says: “If the chips are down, the Timaru and Canterbury District Police have access to plenty of resources and appropriate partners and agencies to help us cope with any challenges that confront us.”
Stuart Nash: Does she think the fact that her Government gave Police $170 million less than it said it needed to “make a dent in serious crime” is the reason why nearly 60 percent of police across the country do not believe that New Zealand Police delivers on the promises it makes to its customers?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No. I think it is clear that the public do not feel that way, because the latest Citizens’ Satisfaction Survey shows that 84 percent of the public are satisfied with the police, and 87 percent said that their expectations were met or exceeded.
Ron Mark: Does the fact that, unlike the Defence Force, police do not account for the ammunition they use or lose, do not keep any records of how many handcuffs, Tasers, or pepper sprays they have lost, and continue to lose pistols and major parts of their M4 Bushmasters—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Can we have the question please.
Ron Mark: —including magazines, not support police officers’ views that they do not get sufficient training on firearms, clearly evidenced by their lax controls?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No. This Government believes that we are very fortunate to have a highly committed and motivated police workforce that continues to show high levels of engagement and commitment to keeping our communities safe. This Government backs our police; it does not run them down.
Stuart Nash: Is she concerned that only 50 percent of the police themselves believe that New Zealand Police cares about the well-being of its staff when the State sector benchmark is 65 percent; if so, why?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: As I say, there is always room for improvement, and this Government is always looking for ways to support our police, because we know that they have an important job. They fulfil an important role, but they cannot act alone. We have to support them with a number of other agencies, and they have to be supported by our communities.
Stuart Nash: Supplementary.
Mr SPEAKER: No, the Labour caucus has used all of its questions today, I am sorry, Mr Nash.
Schools, Buildings—Wairarapa College
12. ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa) to the Associate Minister of Education: What recent announcements has he made to improve school infrastructure in the Wairarapa?
Hon TIM MACINDOE (Associate Minister of Education): I am pleased to advise the House that the Government recently announced that we would be investing around $10 million to redevelop Masterton’s Wairarapa College, in the member’s electorate. This brings the total investment in school redevelopments in the Greater Wellington region to around $127 million in the past 18 months alone.
Alastair Scott: How will this investment benefit students and teachers at Wairarapa College?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: Wairarapa College is one of the oldest schools in the region and has some wonderful buildings with great heritage value, but, as a result of that age, some of the buildings are now, regrettably, in poor condition. The students and teachers of the school will benefit from significant classroom upgrades, new gymnasium changing rooms, a teaching area in that gymnasium, and the replacement of the school’s boiler. The school’s principal has been quoted recently as saying that this $10 million grant “will enable the school to continue to improve its commitment to providing the best education they can.” [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! That concludes questions for oral answer. [Interruption] Order! I do not have to keep calling for order from people who will not respect when I ask for a bit of cooperation. If I have got to ask another member to leave, I will not hesitate to do so.
Bills
Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2)
Second Reading
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Local Government): I move, That the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. New Zealand has a strong and growing economy, and, as a result, we are seeing regions right across the country grow and thrive as never before. However, with growth comes challenges, and we know this growth puts pressures on local authorities. So we need to ensure that essential infrastructure services are provided efficiently and sustainably.
The current legislation does not do enough to support changes to the delivery of these services. In some cases it would require making radical changes, or large-scale amalgamations of multiple councils, to achieve results that are in the best interests of the regions and their residents. There are already a large number of shared services between councils across the country. Many of these are doing well, including here in Wellington, which serves as a good example in the water space. But there are few shared services in areas like transport, and there is no legislative framework for the management of large organisations delivering core water or transport functions on behalf of multiple councils.
This bill will support improved service delivery and infrastructure provision at the local government level. It provides for a more flexible and responsive process by the Local Government Commission. It also allows local councils to lead their own reorganisation processes for the first time. It provides for more collaborative structures for councils to use when delivering services to their communities. These new processes and tools are designed to be enabling and will result in changes for councils only if that change is in the best interest of the region and makes sense locally.
I want to convey my appreciation to the Local Government and Environment Committee, which closely examined the bill and recommended, by majority, that it be passed with a significant number of amendments. I am disappointed, however, that having spoken with the local government sector, having listened to its feedback, and having made a large number of the changes that had been asked for, the Opposition members of the committee were still not prepared to support the bill. I understand that the committee received 188 written submissions, heard oral evidence from 84, and that many submitters supported the bill’s intent to enable improved service delivery and infrastructure provision at the local government level. However, I believe many also expressed reservations about the way that the bill set out to achieve this. The select committee has acknowledged the submissions of Local Government New Zealand and the Society of Local Government Managers, which were particularly useful from both a policy and a technical standpoint.
There were a number of points on which submitters had particularly strong views. The introduced version of the bill allowed the Local Government Commission to create a multiple-owned council-controlled organisation (CCO) without the agreement of all affected councils. Whilst the bill was never intended to enable the commission to impose CCOs without full consultation with local authorities and communities, it obviously caused concern. I am therefore pleased to note that the power for the commission to create those multiple-owned council-controlled organisations without the agreement of all affected local authorities has been removed from the bill.
Concerns were also raised about apparent unilateral powers for the Minister of Local Government to require additional information relating to council performance. Having spoken at length with, and having listened to the sector, I am satisfied that the local government sector can and should lead performance improvement programmes in collaboration with central government. We therefore support the select committee’s initiative to remove these provisions from the bill.
Other changes have been made to address a number of points where submitters had particular concerns. A number are to clarify certain aspects of the bill and avoid misinterpretation. For example, where councils had to seek the approval of the Local Government Commission before consulting on the establishment of multiple-owned CCOs, changes have been made to clarify that the Local Government Commission must grant permission unless it is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the disadvantages significantly outweigh the advantages.
Now that these changes have been recommended, I believe we have a bill that will be more practical for the local government sector. The intent is clearer, and the opportunities it provides are more accessible. We have a bill whose core reform principles remain: to encourage and enable timely improvements to the delivery of services and provision of infrastructure at the local level. We are introducing the ability for councils to lead reorganisation processes directly, if they so choose. This will be the first time that councils will be able to lead processes like this, and many councils have told the committee that they are supportive of this empowering change.
There will be an improved menu of options for councils to choose from when delivering services, including CCOs, joint committees, and transfers of functions. This is a bill that will also provide for new, flexible reorganisation processes. The Local Government Commission will be able to tailor its approach directly to local circumstances and issues, not just in terms of what is under discussion but also in terms of the process and consultations with councils and the public. It will have greater latitude in responding to reorganisation proposals, so that the most pressing receive its urgent attention. Along with its independence and this greater flexibility, the commission will be held to more stringent and transparent accountability arrangements.
I do need to point out that the local government commissioners are doing a fantastic job. Over the last couple of years they have taken a collegial approach to their conversations with councils and communities. The changes we are proposing through this bill will help ensure that this collaborative, transparent model of engagement is embedded in the way that the commission works.
I would note that while a lot of the bill is concerned with governance and accountability mechanisms for CCOs, this is not because CCOs are the preference. These reforms are not designed to impose a set of structures on local government. Rather they are intended to create a system of rules to ensure that shareholders can maintain an appropriate level of oversight over their council-controlled organisations.
The Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) will lead to better local outcomes for our communities. As a result of this bill, we expect to see affordable and sustainable value for ratepayers and residents, through more cost-effective delivery of services and infrastructure. We will see councils empowered to jointly deliver water and transport services, which could achieve benefits from scale, integration, and specialist expertise.
The Government supports the recommendations made by the Local Government and Environment Committee on this bill. The empowering nature of this bill is an opportunity for the sector to show its local strategic leadership, which may require hard decisions about difficult options in order to secure a positive future for its communities. The need for decisive action varies in its urgency, but it is very real. For some struggling councils, the status quo is already not a viable option.
The Government hopes that councils will take up the tools and opportunities presented by this bill, such as the new locally led reorganisation provisions, and use these to assist with improving their service delivery and infrastructure provisions.
Finally, I want to thank the select committee for the work it has done on the bill. I commend this bill to the House.
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) and to lay out very clearly that Labour will not be supporting this legislation. This is not a decision that we came to lightly. It is one that we are disappointed to have to make, given the amount of time and opportunity there was in the Local Government and Environment Committee to fix up a very untidy piece of legislation.
I think it is worthwhile considering the history of this bill. It was introduced back in June 2016, by the then Minister of Local Government, Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga. Obviously, we have had a change of Minister in that time. It was then referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee on 15 June 2016, with submissions due by 28 July 2016. In this short period of time, 188 submissions, including 66 from territorial and local authorities, were heard. The Minister had to ask for a 5-month extension to the report-back date, and according to the Department of Internal Affairs report back, that was because the submitters regarded the consultation prior to the introduction of the bill as inadequate.
So what we have here is a really important piece of legislation, with a very clearly defined set of stakeholders, that simply has been botched from the beginning, by this Government. It failed to consult properly with the local government representatives before it was introduced, so it is no surprise that the Government got it wrong. This is a piece of legislation that the select committee was able to do some work on, but, unfortunately, all the changes that were required to make this a workable piece of legislation and something that actually would be in the best interests of the country were not agreed to at the select committee. It is for those reasons that Labour is unable to offer the Government its support for this bill.
There is a very, very fundamental principle for us on this side of the House when it comes to local government, and that is that we should keep the “local” in it. That is something we believe in, to our very core. This piece of legislation erodes that very and most basic principle. This is a bill that, if the Government had any sense, it would have let it languish on the Order Paper for a few more short weeks, and it would not have seen the light of day in this House. Quite frankly, it is an embarrassment from go to whoa for the Government—this piece of legislation.
While what we are seeing in the reported-back bill is an improvement on what first landed on the select committee’s desks, it still has serious flaws in it, which we are going to traverse at great length, I would like to point out—great length—through the Committee stage. We look forward to taking a very long journey through the problems of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) and the ways in which the Government has botched it.
The bill as it was introduced—let us think about who did oppose it. It was opposed not only by local councils, regional councils, and district councils, but also by Local Government New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Local Government Managers. It was seen as a serious intrusion by central government and unelected bodies—that is the Local Government Commission—on the business of elected local government organisations; that what it was doing was really taking away the ability of those jobs to govern at that most basic of levels, the local level.
The bill as it is reported back seeks to promote larger councils and council-controlled organisations and greater central government influence, and that is where we have a problem. It is the ability of the Minister to intervene—it is the ability of the Minister to influence via the commission that is the basis of Labour’s opposition. We had concerns about the additional powers conferred on the Local Government Commission, which—let us never forget—is an unelected body. We can appoint the best and the most skilled people to that body, and it is not an objection to those people, but it is against the fundamental issue that the Local Government Commission is an unelected body that will be making decisions that should be in the hands of a democratic process, not Government appointees.
We do not say that just because at the moment—until September—National leads this Government. We would say that when we are in Government too—that we believe fundamentally in that. We do not see how this will benefit local democracies when we have the power of the Minister to direct the work that the Local Government Commission carries out. That is not something that is in this country’s best interest and is not something that we can support. The fact that central government, via the Minister, will appoint members of the commission with only one appointee needing to have local government experience does not bode well for the independence of that commission.
Local government is a fascinating but complex beast, and I would like to know that these people who are being appointed to the commission have some experience in that sector. This is not a place for bland managerialism. This is a place for people who understand the sector: the needs, the opportunities, and the challenges of local government; not Government cronies from whatever side being appointed to make decisions in an entirely undemocratic way.
Enhancing the powers and scope of the unelected Local Government Commission is risky and at odds with the stated aims of promoting council-led organisations that are covered off in this bill. We want to make sure that critical utilities retain public ownership, and that should be a question for elected bodies, not Government-appointed local government commissioners. This should only ever be a decision that they can make.
It is unclear where the justification is for the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2), which we have sitting in front of us, or how it will lead to any real community benefits. When we get to the Committee stage of this bill we will be asking the Minister, clause by clause, where the community benefits are and how this makes things better for our local authorities and for our communities, because local government legislation is fundamentally about everyday New Zealanders. We are all beneficiaries of what local government does and that needs to be understood.
Something else that I want to get on the record is this: when we come to vote on this piece of legislation, this legislation may well pass with the barest of majorities—in fact, a one-vote majority. I would like it on the record that that vote will be the vote of Todd Barclay, and this is the reason that we have a Government that has failed to act in a moral way in dealing with this situation. So we have five pieces of legislation that this Government has muddled, befuddled, and completely botched up because it cannot handle a legislative agenda. It is now down to the wire and it is having to rely on that vote to get them across the line. What we have is a piece of legislation that is not in the best interests of this country—that is concentrating more power into the hands of a Minister and an executive in an arrogant way that absolutely ignores what is best for local communities and for local communities to be able to make those decisions for themselves.
But what adds even more insult to injury is that we have a Prime Minister who has not acted in a way you would expect a leader and a Prime Minister to act, because he needs to get this shambles of a piece of legislation across the line. [Interruption] This is about the bill, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is about how this bill will become law in this country, and it will be up to the voters of New Zealand on 23 September to make a decision as to whether this is the kind of leadership they want, whether this is the way they want their legislation passed. I put it to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to this House that this speaks to the situation that we now have after 9 years of this Government—a Government that has no moral compass—
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stick to the bill—
Dr MEGAN WOODS: —and a piece of legislation that is clearly not in the best interest of communities. Labour cannot support this. We worked hard at select committee to get the changes over the line that would make this a piece of legislation that we could vote for, but it is simply yet another piece of flawed and broken legislation from this Government, which if we are unfortunate enough to have this Government back in power—well, we will need to do it as a Government anyway—will have to be back fixing it, because this has been a shambles from time the bill was introduced.
ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking to the second reading of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2). Mr Deputy Speaker, I feel sorry for you, listening to that tripe—absolute tripe—from that previous speaker, Megan Woods. What I would just like to do, first of all, is acknowledge the previous Minister who introduced this bill into the House, the Hon Sam Lotu-Iiga, and the former chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee, now the Hon Scott Simpson, for working their way through the bill.
As has been noted previously, the bill was introduced into the House some time ago, back in 2016, but the Government has deliberately delayed its finalisation to take into account the views of many of the submitters, including Local Government New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Local Government Managers (SOLGM), as well as other relevant parties. That is a Government that is listening to what is going on, contrary to the assertion made just before.
The purpose of this bill is to give local authorities more flexibility to coordinate and combine resources and infrastructure, especially in relation to networks across their regions. At present, unfortunately, legislation does not provide for that very easily. So this bill is about providing greater flexibility at the choice of the local councils involved.
Given the financial constraints of many of our smaller territorial local authorities (TLAs), it is becoming imperative to—and, in fact, they are wanting to—actually coordinate and collaborate better with other relevant local councils, particularly contiguous ones. This bill provides for that, but it also provides for larger organisations and larger councils to come together under their agreed arrangements, so that they can better coordinate their capital spend planning and how they utilise their operations and their infrastructure so as to get a better outcome for their ratepayers.
Now, this is something that they will want to do. That is driven by them; it is not driven by us. And there is a perverse view about that. So this creates the opportunity, particularly for infrastructure such as transport and also for water and waste-water services, in particular, to come together across multiple jurisdictions. It also creates the opportunity for other, what are now termed, substantive council-controlled organisations (CCOs), where there are assets of more than $10 million involved, or by agreement, to provide greater certainty where there are multiple-owned CCOs—or, what I mean is, owned by many CCOs and controlled by them.
For the first time, the councils will be able to lead the reorganisation proposals, in consultation with their communities and neighbouring councils. Parts of those reforms mean that when they do want to do that and their CCOs are set up, those CCOs will have the right to have bylaw-making powers, and also the ability to collect certain revenues. The changes in the bill have made it very careful that those changes are subject to the controlling councils.
There have also been substantial changes to the Local Government Commission. This bill provides for the commission to have enhanced powers to work with councils and Government to support their reorganisation proposals. There are a whole lot of administrative issues around the commission, to enable it to work better, but one of the key changes is that the Minister has been given the authority to set out an expectation for the commission, but the commission must then report back by way of statement of corporate intent and an annual work plan.
One of the key changes is that, previously, TLAs had to get the approval of the Local Government Commission before consulting on transfer proposals. One of the crucial changes is that the commission must agree to any TLA proposal unless it is satisfied, on reasonable grounds—and I just note that point—that the disadvantages of the proposal significantly outweigh the advantages of the proceeding transfer. This has shifted the obligation and given more powers for councils to put forward proposals and less authority for the commission to overturn them.
My last point, contrary to the last speaker—I just do not know where she is getting her information, but I just want to put it on record—is that this bill has the support of Local Government New Zealand—
Michael Wood: No, it does not.
ANDREW BAYLY: —and SOLGM. There is an assertion that it does not—it does. On this basis, I am very much looking forward to debating the merits of this bill as it progresses through the House. Thank you.
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Meka Whaitiri—a 5-minute call.
MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. E ngā mema o Te Whare, tēnā tātou katoa. Is it not interesting? Is it not interesting that when we come to a bill like this, we talk about the intention and then the reality—where the reality hits the road. We have just had both Minister Tolley and that member who has just resumed his seat, Andrew Bayly, talk about the virtues of this bill. This side absolutely wants to support a modern local government sector. We absolutely want to support it, but not at the expense of taking away control from our duly elected local officials, and that is what this bill is doing. It is actually saying to every council around New Zealand: “You actually don’t know how to run your affairs.” When it comes to water—
Hon Member: No, it doesn’t.
MEKA WHAITIRI: Yes, it does. When it comes to water and transport, the message this Government is sending to every council around this country is: “It’s all right. We’re going to come and rescue you, because we don’t think you know how to operate at the local level. We actually don’t think you’re making good, sound judgments on your locally owned assets, be they transport or water.” But do not worry—do not worry—because this National Government, with its one-vote advantage from Mr Todd Barclay, will get this bill over the line!
The question I pose to this Government is: what is the problem that this bill is attempting to solve? I listened to the Minister. I listened to the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee. I was listening for what the problem is that this bill is trying to address. I could not hear it—could not hear it.
The next question I ask is: does this bill promote local democracy? It does not, because it empowers the Local Government Commission, which, we all know, is unelected, to make decisions on where we may reorganise. Where does it get its riding instructions? Not from the councils; it gets them from the Minister, under this bill. The Minister will actually lay out where the commission will go hunting to reconfigure the way our councils should be. This goes to the opening point I made about this being the bill that is going to determine how councils around the country are going to organise themselves around water and transport assets—assets that we, as ratepayers, own, but this Government believes it knows best what to do with.
The second question I want to ask is: why is the Government promoting a non-elected body to determine how councils organise themselves? We do not have to go very far to look at the botch-ups of the recent amalgamations. And is this bill an attempt to address that? Is it an attempt to address the botched-up, forced amalgamations that, thank goodness, local people, particularly in our electorates—my good colleague Napier MP, Stuart Nash, and I have stood up and said: “No way. No way do we want forced amalgamation.” That was in only one of many areas, and this bill is attempting to do it again.
But in the time I have got left, I want to talk about Local Government New Zealand. I want to talk about its concerns as expressed at the select committee. There were five concerns that it identified. It talked about the lowering of the threshold required to initiate a reorganisation investigation, and the powers of the Minister of Local Government, effectively, to direct the Local Government Commission to undertake an investigation, and I have touched on that in my previous comments. Secondly, there is the ability of the Local Government Commission to shift activities into council-controlled organisations (CCOs) and away from the direct control of local authorities without first securing the agreement of local authorities. Thirdly, there are the provisions that will allow substantively and multiple-owned CCOs to require their shareholding councils to amend their development contribution policies. Fourthly, there is a lack of mechanisms such as the individual shareholder’s agreement to ensure that multiple-owned CCOs act in accordance with each shareholding council’s policies, priorities, and service levels. Fifthly, there is the ability of the Minister of Local Government to set performance measures for council activities, including substantive CCOs.
I want to acknowledge that the select committee worked really hard to address these five concerns put up by Local Government New Zealand, and that member Andrew Bayly saying that it supports the bill is debatable. That is why we are debating this important piece of legislation here in its second reading.
I would say that with those five issues raised by Local Government New Zealand, it has not gone deep enough. That is my proposition to this House. Those five fundamental concerns raised by Local Government New Zealand have not been adequately addressed in the bill that we are debating in the House in this second reading. That is something that this Government needs to take on board. It is why Labour is standing up for local councils, democracy, and the control of our elected officials making decisions. Kia ora tātou.
STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Mr Bayly stated in his speech that this bill allows councils to better coordinate services. Well, this already happens, and let me give you an example. In Hawke’s Bay, for example, there are 30 shared services agreements between Napier City Council and Hastings District Council. This is about councillors sitting down together and deciding for themselves what works and what does not work. It is a fantastic model of councils working together. There does not need to be legislation that forces this to happen.
Mr Bayly also outlined the fact that these new council-controlled organisations (CCOs) have the right to pass by-laws and to raise revenue—but this is undemocratic because the CCOs are not responsible to ratepayers. I actually think this bill is amalgamation by stealth.
Along with my good colleague Meka Whaitiri, I met with Local Government New Zealand, including the chair, a chap called Lawrence Yule, who is a National Party candidate, and if anyone knows anything about local government, it is Lawrence Yule. He told Meka and me that he was against the bill. He outlined very clearly the reasons why the organisation that he represents, Local Government New Zealand, did not want this bill.
If this was going to add value to councils or if this was going to drive growth in the community in any way, shape, or form, then we would be supporting it—there is no doubt about that—but it just does not do that. The thing is that this is not just me or Megan Woods or Meka Whaitiri saying this; this is the mayors and the councillors themselves, who are elected by the communities that make up the diverse fabric that is New Zealand.
I ran a campaign in Napier and it was based around the “No to amalgamation” slogan. There was wide and varied debate. The people who wanted to amalgamate spent literally a couple of hundred thousand dollars on this. There were town hall meetings, there was a lot of advertising material, and this was probably the only topic of discussion around the dinner tables of Hawke’s Bay for about a year, I would say. So this was widely canvassed and widely discussed, and the arguments to and fro were well laid out.
The thing is that those four councils—Hastings, Napier, Wairoa, and Central Hawke’s Bay—all voted against it. They all voted in the majority against amalgamation. And the irony is that Lawrence Yule, who at that point was supporting amalgamation, could not even get it across the line in Hastings, his own area, and he was surprised. What he said after that was: “I misjudged the sentiment. I didn’t understand what the people wanted.”
I looked at the first reading speech of the former Minister of Local Government Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga. It was delivered over a year ago, and he said: “The current legislation focuses on amalgamation to gain scale for shared services.” Well, the thing is that our communities do not want amalgamation. Where there are synergies that can be gained from shared services, then they happen. In fact, as Meka Whaitiri outlined, I actually think that this shows an arrogance at its worst, and that is that central government knows best. But, in fact, it does not and where democracy—
Hon Members: National Party.
STUART NASH: Sorry, what have I said?
Meka Whaitiri: You said “central government”.
STUART NASH: Well, yes, central government, but the National Government in this case. But what we see in our communities is that the local people say: “What does central government know about what my community wants?”. That is why we have elected councils. That is why local government works really well, because communities have a say in their own future. They can determine the vision that is provided and, do you know what? If they do not like it, then they vote the mayor out and they vote the councils out. If they do like the way the councils are providing, they put ’em in. Keep away, central government. Keep away, National Government.
This is not about democracy. In fact, I would argue that it is an erosion of democracy. That is why the Labour Party simply cannot support this local government bill. But it is not that we do not want greater efficiency in local councils. Absolutely, we do. In fact, if we had our way, I think we would probably empower local government in a way that drives efficiency and progress and a vision for the way we want our communities governed. This is not the legislation to do it. I think that the former Minister of Local Government actually should have listened to Local Government New Zealand and he should have listened to the mayors and the councils that he went around the country to consult, because they also said no. Thank you.
MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) in its second reading. Since we are talking about local government, I just want to start by acknowledging the Waimakariri District Council; the leadership of its mayor, David Ayers; the CEO, Jim Palmer; and the whole of the council for their leadership post-earthquake. It is fair to say that due to the capability, the strength, and the resilience of the council, it has shown clear leadership, and that is why the Waimakariri has bounced back strongly since the earthquakes.
It is worth noting though that Kaiapoi was one of the most hard-hit towns. Kaiapoi used to have a council of its own, before the towns of Waimakariri came together, under one council. And you would say that, post that devastating earthquake in 2010, the Kaiapoi council would not have had the scale and capability to respond to the sheer devastation of that first earthquake in 2010. So I suppose the point of that example is to clearly show that economies of scale are something that we should be looking at. And I think when you look at the underpinning of this bill, it is about economies of scale and how councils can come together in the form of council-controlled organisations (CCOs) to improve service delivery, improve infrastructure, and drive down costs. There would not be one electorate MP or list MP in this Chamber today who has not had a multiple of constituent appointments about their council and how they get better value for their rates. And I think this is exactly what this bill is about.
It also shows very clearly, around the legislative process—we had the first bill, which was introduced in the version around CCOs and the councils. In that first draft it was not necessary that all councils agreed to the CCOs. We heard submissions. As people round the House have said, there were 188 submissions—75 from local authorities and CCOs, 59 from individual submitters, and 13 from community organisations. From that, this bill has changed somewhat, and it comes back in the form it is in now, in its second reading.
What that leaves open now is council needing to agree to the formulation of a CCO. What it basically means is that councils need to be open to the Government’s arrangements to drive up that service improvement, and infrastructure. When we look at one example of a CCO—transport has been highlighted, specifically in Canterbury. Post-earthquakes, we have had a lot of trouble around transport and transport solutions. We have had multiple councils involved. Getting them together, under a CCO, will provide that clear vision where they can come up with an integrated transport package—unlike, I suppose, what the Labour Party has thrown at transport recently in Christchurch, with its $100 million rail announcement that clearly only targets west Christchurch, and not all those commuters in north Christchurch.
So what we are looking at is a bill that will, ultimately, drive further service improvement, it will drive down costs, but, also, it will give many constituents of ours the feeling they are getting better value for money with their rates. Thank you.
JAN LOGIE (Green): The Green Party too is proud to oppose this appalling piece of legislation. Just to give a context to some of the feeling we have heard, we have heard some of the Government members talking to this saying that they listened, you know, and that they were very carefully listening to submitters and they have made all these changes.
I would just like to give the House a sense of the tone of some of the submitters, many of whom will have been National Party members. I do remember one particular submitter, who was an ex - National Party member of Parliament, I think, actually telling the Government it would not be re-elected if this piece of legislation went through in the form it is in. Some of the comments were “This legislation is ill-informed and ill-conceived.”, and that was from the Palmerston North City Council; “This represents a loss of local self-determination.”, from the Hutt City Council; “This bill strikes at the very heart of local democracy … There is real anger across local government that this has been dumped on us without consultation.”, from the Greater Wellington Regional Council; and “It is not just undemocratic, this is anti-democratic.”, from the Mayor of Napier.
A fundamental question was also posed by a local community organisation that works with the council in Upper Hutt. It asked “Why would you disempower people from participating to create better communities? We need to consider how to raise civic engagement, not take away people’s options for engaging.”, which is what this bill did and what this bill still continues—in the trend of actions from this Government—to do.
So I do want to acknowledge Local Government New Zealand and the leaders in local government for forcing the Government to listen and for working so hard with the officials to significantly improve this piece of legislation, and I do acknowledge that it has been significantly improved. However, in the Green Party, we still have very significant outstanding concerns and, from the tone of the submissions, we do not think that those concerns have been addressed.
Like previous speakers, we heard continually from submitters that they did not see what the problem was. They were finding that in their local areas—and we were hearing this from Canterbury, we were hearing this from Wellington; we were hearing this from all over—councils were collaborating and working effectively together without needing these changes. People did not see where the problem was, and we have to understand that this law change comes within the context of the Government’s suspension of democracy in Canterbury, the removal of the four well-beings from the Local Government Act 2002, and the restrictions on notifications and opportunities for public participation under the Resource Management Act. We are seeing a trend of just encroaching influence from this National Government into local government affairs.
We heard directly from Matt Doocey, the last speaker, about how councils need to be open to Government plans to drive service improvements and reduce costs. That is more of the same thinking—about those members knowing best. The thing is that, actually, our country and our constitutional arrangements, such as we have them, rely on this concept of subsidiarity and local democracy. Our councils have been tasked with doing specific jobs for their communities, and that the relationship in terms of determining whether they are doing a good job or a bad job is accountable back to their local communities, not this Government. That seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding and a thread in the legislation that we have been seeing through this House under this Government.
One of our concerns about this legislation is that it is has an increased role for the Local Government Commission, and this is an unelected group of people who are appointed by a Minister of this Government. Within the context of knowing this was happening and that this was probably going to go through in some form, there were discussions about trying to get more people on the commission with guaranteed local government experience, and even in that concept, in negotiations with the Government, all that it would give was to allow one person on that commission to be required to have local government experience. It really does send a message that, actually, this Government does not value the knowledge and the expertise of our local government leaders, and that, to the Green Party, is a problem.
Also in this legislation are greater powers for the Minister to set expectations and, effectively, direct the commission’s work. New section 31A in clause 16 of the bill gives the Minister the authority to specify expectations in relation to areas that may be subject to an investigation, and also to areas that may not be subject to an investigation. That is actually quite significant if there has been an amalgamation like the one that was put in place in Auckland, as an example. If some of those communities there decided to go to the Local Government Commission and say that they did not want to be part of the super-city—which we know was set up as a National Government policy—then, actually, the Minister would have the power to direct the Local Government Commission not to investigate a reorganisation, even though that community might want it. It is such a reinforcement of this power imbalance.
Also, there is the requirement on councils to seek the approval of the commission before consulting a transfer of responsibilities or an establishment of a multiple-owned water or transport council-controlled organisation (CCO). So this idea that this is just about supporting councils to be able to deliver and work together goes completely against that, because they are being forced to consult, and their wisdom, their knowledge, and their accountability to the communities is being undermined through these provisions.
We also have remaining unease about the additional role of the Minister in directing the replacement or revoking of performance measures for councils. Initially, the Minister was going to be able to set them up—that was in the initial review, which was quite extraordinary—and that has been pulled back to the Minister now being able to direct the replacement or revoke performance measures post a review. But it still kind of just puts that idea in place that a Minister from this place would have any responsibility for performance measures to decide the accountabilities of a council to its community. Surely, as we were often told by submitters, what matters in terms of accountability with regard to performance measures is whether you are delivering for your community, not whether you are delivering on the central government’s agenda of what it thinks you should be delivering on.
We also heard from the Minister that this legislation is about increased transparency. Well, the Government has put in some ability for Official Information Act requests through the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, but the limitations are that you would be able to access the information going into investigations and reorganisation investigations, but that will apply, and you will get access, only after the consideration, investigation, resolution, or determination has been completed. So that is kind of a little bit too late, folks. It is transparency after the fact, and I am not sure how much that actually counts as transparency.
We also heard from the Minister that this is not privileging CCOs as a model, and yet I think she needs to have communicated more clearly to her MPs who were on the committee whether that was her intent, because we have certainly heard from several of the National Party members about how the CCOs are actually the way to drive service improvements and reduction in costs. Yet those same members heard from submitters talking to us about an increasing problem around the CCOs that have already been created of contracting to larger organisations. Therefore, our chain of businesses in New Zealand is now being compromised, because small family-owned business that used to develop intellectual property and innovation from getting these contracts are being forced into the role of being subcontractors to these bigger businesses because the CCOs want to deal with only one, and we are losing a huge amount of capacity in our country as a result.
RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): It is an interesting debate that I am listening to, and it is one of those delightful occasions when I find myself concurring with the views expressed both to the left and right of me, by the Green Party and the Labour Party. I am somewhat saddened—
Hon Ruth Dyson: Ah, quit while you’re ahead—that’s good.
RON MARK: —put that down; I actually said it—by the pathway that the Government has chosen to take in respect of local government.
In my time as the Mayor of Carterton, I stood helplessly by and watched this Government continue on a pathway, whereby through passing legislation it sought to advance amalgamations aiming at the size and scale and a repetition of what it achieved in Auckland—and, my, has that not gone so well! Has that not gone so well! We sit here, looking at this piece of legislation—continuing to look at this piece of legislation—as we have done over the last number of months. One glaring question leaps out: why? Why has the Government put this piece of legislation up in the first place? Why did it choose to do it in the way that it has done it? When it first entered their tiny little minds that there was something wrong in the State of Denmark—i.e. local government—and that they needed to intervene and write legislation—
Hon Ruth Dyson: Do you know about local government?
RON MARK: —well, we might just touch on a wee bit of that, the Hon Ruth Dyson—why did Government members not think, just for a fleeting moment, that they should go and talk with people who understand local government.
You see, one thing that I do know is that sitting on one side of the table at the Local Government and Environment Committee were five people with experience in local government. Sitting on the other side—although it was hard to keep track, with the comings and goings and things that happened—there were none. I think occasionally Mr Ian McKelvie popped in, which added one former mayor, but I also sit here and wonder how much sway that gentleman has in his caucus, because he is an experienced mayor. Actually—not quite so experienced—there is another mayor in that caucus: old Jono—
Hon Ruth Dyson: Maureen.
RON MARK: —and Maureen Pugh. There is local government experience in the National caucus, but there was none on the select committee. Why is that? It is probably because if those experienced members, with their personal views—which they do let out into the ether when they are trying to calm the rebellion in provincial New Zealand, and when their good friends say “What the hell are you people doing?”, they say things like: “Oh, no, no. Don’t worry—no. Ah, well, you know, if you’re in the caucus, you’re bound by caucus—you know. It’s sort of like you’re—well, it’s not about being whipped; you’ve got to go with the flow. You’ve got to go.” If you want to be elected back—if you want to be back on the list, you have to go with the Government’s policy and support the Minister. So what those ones with local government experience are saying in the hustings and what they are voting for here in the House today—this piece of legislation—are not the same thing.
It saddens me, as a former Mayor of Carterton, who does understand the concerns of local government New Zealand and who does talk to people like Lawrence Yule and other mayors, that this Government: (1) does not understand local government, (2) does not care, and (3) is not really interested in democracy and has no interest in localism. The idea of local people deciding for themselves: (a) how they want to elect their council, (b) how they want their assets to be owned or managed, and (c) whether or not they want to be divested of those assets that they have built up over 150 or 175 years, with money out of their own pockets, with no assistance at all from any central government, no matter what colour it might have been—no one seems to think, over that side, that these people might actually have their own views on how those assets should be held, whether they are held in council-controlled organisations (CCOs) or not. No one on that side of the Government seems to want to listen to the fact that there is a raging debate going on up in Auckland about CCOs and the control of them and the vesting of power in appointed boards that have no obligation whatsoever to listen to Mrs Buttons at 58 King Street when she says: “I don’t want our sewage system—our waste-water treatment plant—to be divested into the hands and the control of a bunch of appointed bean counters or corporates.” She does not want it.
When I hear National members stand up and say: “Well, we couldn’t imagine how Kaiapoi would possibly have handled the Canterbury earthquakes if it had still had a little council—because, of course, size and scale is what got Christchurch through!”. Seriously? Does Matt Doocey really believe that? If he does, he needs to explain to me how in 1929 when the 7.8 Murchison earthquake hit, all those little county councils and all those little borough councils—how did they get by? In 1931 Hawke’s Bay got whacked on 3 February, and got whacked again on 13 February. How many councils made up the Hawke’s Bay prior to the 1989 reforms? Dozens and dozens. How did they get by? Matt Doocey says they would never have survived.
In 1934 Pahīatua got whacked on 3 February. On 24 June 1942 Wairarapa got hit, and got hit again on 2 August—the biggest earthquake since 1931. It was massive. It knocked down the Carterton post office. On 22 February 1863 Hawke’s Bay got hit. How did they all possibly survive and rebuild and recover to be the wonderful places that they are, with all of the infrastructure that this Government now wants to take off them and vest into the hands of some corporate-minded bean counters with no ability for the ratepayer to have their democratic say about how those assets are managed, how high their rates are going to go up, how high the fees are going to go up, and what levies are going to be placed? How did those small county councils and borough councils ever, ever, ever get through those major earthquakes, Matt Doocey? I think you need to go back to school and do some learning. Spend some time talking to some local government people.
Actually, we would have been better off if the National Government had taken all of its members who had served in local government, stuck them on the select committee, and given them free rein to work with the Opposition members and produce a bill that we could all have come back to the House and supported—but it did not. It rammed it through, with no interest at all in what we have done in the Wairarapa. Talking about CCOs—CCOs are not the only solution to better management or more cohesive or collaborative management, and that is actually the word—“collaborative management”. Shared services work. Shared services in the Wairarapa has been going on for the last 10 or 15 years, and increasingly so. But the great thing about doing it that way is that the councillors get to sit on the committee—the duly elected people.
There is the message. If this Government does not trust Local Government New Zealand enough to go and talk to it and ask it what the bill would look like it if wrote it; if it does not trust the councils enough to listen to their submissions; and if it does not trust enough the mayors or the councillors who have just been elected in 2016, a number of whom were booted out because they believed in this amalgamation philosophy of the National Party, then what it is saying is that all of those card-carrying members of the National Party who are mayors, who are regional councillors, who are councillors, and who do chair these committees do not know what they are doing—do not know what they are doing—do not know what is best, do not know what is right, and are stupid. Actually, that may explain why such a large number of them are leaving the National Party in droves in provincial New Zealand, and why our membership is doing so well, and why our committees are building and growing. Finally, those people have actually realised, out in rural provincial New Zealand and in councils and district councils all over New Zealand, that the National Party has become too arrogant and too dismissive, and is actually not interested in their opinions at all.
JOANNE HAYES (National): I stand to take a short call on this bill. After listening to that contribution, I cannot support that member, Ron Mark, like I did yesterday. Some of the things that he said around this particular bill I have seen. I might not have been a mayor, but I have actually worked in local government, in quite a big organisation as well, and I could see that there needed to be some reorganisation back then about how it did things.
When I start to look at some of the issues that some of the councils are facing now to do with some of their infrastructure, and the amount of money that they do not have—money that they have not put aside to be able to address some of the infrastructural issues—then I start to look at this particular bill and I start to look at the role of council-controlled organisations (CCOs) and what they are able to provide to local government. Whether it be a large local government organisation or council, or whether it be a small one, we have to take into account that there is only so much money in the rates take, and I can say that whenever there has been a disaster, as that member read out, time after time after time, the councils did come to the Government and we supported them, just like the Christchurch ones.
One of the issues around the Christchurch earthquake was the horizontal infrastructure. That was a huge, huge bill, and as we started to unravel all the issues around the horizontal infrastructure we started to see that other councils were starting to look at how much it was going to cost for them. Therefore, I see the value of CCOs in their being able to take the plans and share out the knowledge that they have to other councils, to actually be able to contract in so we get a better deal for councils to address some of the bigger issues facing councils—issues that you cannot see above the ground. So I look at things. Whanganui District Council has issues around its sewerage, and it has big bills to build that brand new sewerage plant. I used to work there, in the health sector, and I saw all of that happening, so I can see the advantage of CCOs being able to actually come together with councils like Whanganui, in partnership with other councils, to be able to work through those issues with them.
They say that the CCOs will actually force an amalgamation. Well, the CCOs do have to actually have a poll around amalgamation—a poll to determine whether or not amalgamation will go through. That is what CCOs will have to go through, so when they say “Oh, you know, they’re going to make us go through amalgamation.”, that is rubbish. That is rubbish. The bill is very clear that there has to be a poll of all the ratepayers if local government is looking at that area.
If we start looking at the transparency of CCOs, we see that they are subject to the Ombudsmen Act 1975, so they are responsible. So, you know, when you say they going to go off and do whatever they want to do, they just cannot, because they are subject to the Ombudsmen Act 1975.
I could go on and on, but what I am going to do is I am going to stop now. I said it was going to be a short contribution and I meant it. I think that this is a very good bill. It is a good mechanism for councils to come together and to share resources under a CCO mechanism, and I commend it to the House. Thank you.
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Eugenie Sage—a 5-minute call.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Tuarua, e ngā mema o tō tātou Whare, tēnā koutou katoa. I am pleased to speak on the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2). The level of spin from this Government has reached a whole new level when we have the Minister of Local Government talking about the “empowering” nature of this bill. That is alternative facts, and I think it might be a reflection of the fact that we have had a revolving door in the National Government in terms of Ministers of Local Government. Have we had six—or is it seven—Ministers of Local Government in the last 6 years. We have had the Hon Nick Smith, Sam Lotu-Iiga, Paula Bennett, and now the Hon Anne Tolley.
Is it because we have got this revolving door that they totally fail to understand the local government sector and seek to dictate to that sector, or is it a combination of that revolving door plus their ideology? I think it is a bit of both, because the sector made it very clear in its submissions that this bill had been developed without any effective liaison with local government. It was drafted in a very hasty way, it had a number of inconsistencies, and it was poorly thought-out. I think Local Government New Zealand called it “under done”. When you have poor process and a fundamental lack of consultation with local government, then you get very bad law.
But it goes deeper than that, because, as Local Government New Zealand said in its submission—a submission the Minister and others in the National Government do not appear to have read—on this bill, central government “appears to be saying that it does not trust the elected members of local communities to make the right decisions for their communities.”, and that there is a deep, deep, deep misunderstanding of the role of local government. It is not the administrative arm of the central government, as this National Government thinks it is, with the way in which this bill—and in other legislation, like its changes to the Resource Management Act—seeks to dictate to councils what they can do and seeks to undermine local democracy.
This bill as introduced was, and remains, extraordinarily heavy-handed. There has been a huge increase in the Minister’s powers, and that undermines local councils. It diminishes their ability to consult with their communities and to make decisions together with their communities. It increases the power of the Local Government Commission, which, as others have noted, is not elected. It is appointed by Ministers, and, yes, we are going to go up to five members, but they are all appointed members.
So the heart of this bill is actually the Government’s plan B. The reorganisation proposals in Northland, Hawke’s Bay, and Wellington did not work. They were roundly rejected by citizens in local referenda, and so what the Government has done with this bill is significantly increase the power of the Local Government Commission to go ahead with reorganisations, to force councils, initially, to establish council-controlled organisations to take over the assets that communities have built and paid for, in waste water, transport, and the like, and put those in the hands of council-controlled organisations, which are much less accountable. We in the Green Party think that that is a first step towards privatisation.
As one submitter said, the bill as introduced had all the hallmarks of Thatcherism. It represented a giant step towards the death of democracy, dressed up in the fiction that it was about promoting efficiency. Local government is not just about efficiency; it is about representation and accountability, and in the Committee stage we will consider and go through how the bill, as amended, keeps undermining those basic concepts.
The commentary on the bill has 24 pages about the changes that the Local Government and Environment Committee made. Those changes were forced on the Government because of the huge strength of opposition. But in terms of the powers that it gives to the Minister to direct the Local Government Commission, the Local Government Commission’s powers, and the preference for council-controlled organisations rather than councils to manage council services and assets, it is still going way too far, and it is undermining local democracy. That is why the Green Party opposes it. We want to revitalise local democracy. We trust local councils; the Government does not.
MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very pleased to stand up to speak, expressing the Labour Party’s opposition to this bill. I do so as, until recently, an elected member of the Auckland Council, and I especially acknowledge other former elected members in the Chamber.
This is a strange, dislocated, netherworld bill. It started off with a raft of ambitious proposals from the Government that would have gutted local government democracy and created an incredible degree of centralisation within our system. When faced with a tidal wave of opposition at the select committee stage, the Government has pulled back from some of the most egregious changes but, none the less, left us with a bill that no one is asking for and no one is happy with. It still has that noxious element of removing elements of local democracy within our system.
Before moving on to a couple of substantive points, I just want to address a couple of the speeches that we have heard earlier. My Bayly, in his comments earlier on, tried to give some reassurance to the House that people do not need to worry too much. People do not need to worry too much about the amalgamation possibilities arising out of this bill, and that the local government commission had to have regard to the degree and distribution of community support for reorganisation. Well, that is simply laughable to anyone in this Chamber who remembers what happened in 2010 when this Government overrode every single protection and every single aspect of the democratic system to ram through the forced reorganisation of Auckland Council. It overrode the Local Government Act. It took away the right of Auckland citizens to vote upon that reorganisation proposal, and it imposed aspects such as council-controlled organisation (CCOs), which covered core services, in the legislation against the will of the people of Auckland. So it is laughable to suggest that anyone could have a degree of trust in this Government not to force through reorganisation proposals if that is its wish.
Of course, we have seen that again and again and again. It has been a litany of failure—the reorganisation proposals for the Hawke’s Bay, Wellington, and Northland. Mr Doocey let it slip in his comments when he made it very, very clear that he favours small councils in our country being taken over by bigger partners, and reducing the number of territorial local authorities in our country. There is a silly sort of macho “bigger is better” mindset that sits in behind all of this legislation, and his belief that Mr Doocey expressed in his comments was that somehow if we amalgamate, things are going to get cheaper and rates are going to go down. Mr Doocey, may I welcome you to Auckland one day to come to talk to some of our ratepayers. It is an absolute nonsense that amalgamation automatically makes things cheaper or more efficient. It is absolutely established, in fact, in the academic literature, that the massive transition costs of forced amalgamations, or voluntary amalgamations for that matter, very often outweigh any of the efficiency gains that you get.
Let us talk about CCOs, which, really, are the Trojan horse in this piece of legislation for a more corporatised, less democratic form of local government in our country. Let us talk about the efficiency gains, supposedly, that CCOs get. Well, do you realise that within the Auckland Council’s structure—and I say this to the member’s opposite—that we now have eight vertically integrated silo CCOs within the Auckland Council structure? Each has its own communications team. Each has its own senior management team. Each has its own CEO. Each has its own board, for goodness’ sake! And each has all of the structures around that you need to support that. Thank goodness we have got Mayor Phil Goff, who is trying to make some sense of that now. But that CCO structure that was imposed upon Auckland has actually led to less efficiency and less democratic engagement between people and their council than we would otherwise have, and this bill seeks to impose that by stealth on other councils as well.
The reason that many members on this side of the House feel very strongly about this is it is actually a soft constitutional issue. In our country we do not have a written constitution that sets out the separation of powers between different arms of Government, but we are dealing with a democratic system here. Local government is about local people having a say, electing local representatives to make local decisions, to levy local ratepayers through rates, and then to spend that money. That is actually a part of our constitutional structure. We have one of the most centralised forms of Government in the entire world. More is done centrally in New Zealand than virtually anywhere else in the world. Yet this bill seeks to hug more and more powers into the bosom of central government.
This bill actually misses an opportunity. If the Government had have actually sat down with local government—as we have heard from other speakers who actually know something about local government today—and said “How can we work on collaboration better?”, then I absolutely know for a fact that people from local government would have said “Yep, we’ve got some good ideas about how we could do that, to be more efficient, and to deliver services better for our people.” Instead, we have got a typical National Government power-hugging piece of legislation before us, and I will certainly be voting against it later on this afternoon. Thank you.
NUK KORAKO (National): Ā, mauri ora, e Te Mana Whakawā. Can I just start off by first saying that this particular bill has been supported by Local Government New Zealand and also by the Society of Local Government Managers. Let us just be very clear, just to start this off.
One of the things about this bill is that one of the Government’s key priorities is improving public services that are available in New Zealand. We know that a lot of our front-line public services are actually provided by local authorities, be they city, district, or regional councils. This bill empowers local authorities to provide better core services for their constituents—for their constituents. That is what the National-led Government’s better local services reforms—this is what they are all about. All of that is about advancing this particular bill.
One of the major provisions of the bill allows councils to take advantage of opportunities to operate in a more efficient way and to make better use—better use—of ratepayers’ money. This could be through joint ownership of council-controlled organisations (CCOs), where these CCOs can control infrastructure that benefits more than one council.
There is also, for the first time, the opportunity for councils to lead reorganisations, rather than any sort of reorganisation being initiated from the Local Government Commission. That is a very, very important part of this bill. This will be particularly relevant in areas where there is no desire for large-scale amalgamation but a smaller reorganisation would be in the interests of both areas.
The important thing throughout this bill is that it provides for changes in council structure to be locally led. There are also many other benefits for local councils found in the bill. It allows for greater use of council-controlled organisations. It makes the Local Government Commission more transparent, and that is the reason why Local Government New Zealand and, also, the Society of Local Government Managers actually backed this bill in the end—they backed this bill.
The National-led Government has led a huge improvement in the level of public services, and this is just another small part of the programme that we have embarked on to bring better public services to New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): The first thing to correct from that contribution is the mistake that the member Nuk Korako made that this bill has the backing of Local Government New Zealand. It does not. It has not had it from the start; it still has not got it now. This bill has been so problematic for the Government that it delayed a year between the hearing of submissions and reporting back to the House—or close to a year.
The member said that this bill allows the efficient cooperation of councils in respect of jointly delivered services. They can already do that. They do already do that. What they do not want to have is that forced upon them by central government, by this grouping that is full of appointees by the Government, a grouping that the Government controls and, therefore, can inflict upon local government, even if local government does not want it to occur. What are some real examples of this? All that time ago, I used to be on this Local Government and Environment Committee, and I heard the submissions. Councils came to us and they said: “We don’t think this is fair, particularly if we’re a smaller council. If a core part of our revenue comes from, for example, managing roads or water, if we, the council, are forced to cooperate with a CCO that takes that revenue away from us, the council, we cannot afford to employ a decent manager.”
Effectively, if councils are stripped of some of these functions and the spending that is associated with those core functions, they are left with such a small ambit that they cannot recruit the quality of chief executive and the quality of senior staff that they need for other parts of their organisation. So they might, as a consequence, lose capability in their planning department, or in their roading department, because they have had their water department hived off, against their recommendation, to a council-controlled organisation (CCO).
The next thing is that it is a loss of political accountability, and you would have thought that this Government, after it had been beaten back by citizens up and down the land about forced amalgamations, would have learnt its lesson. But, no, the National Government—it knows best. National lost in the Hastings-Napier area, it lost in the Greater Wellington area, it lost in the Wairarapa, and so what does it want to do? It wants to get to a similar outcome through this legislation. Did you know that a CCO contract might last 30 years? You could have a CCO contract for your water—that is, your drinking water—for your stormwater, for your sewerage, and for your transport. What is left for the elected officials?
How long will the contract be? It could be a 30-year contract. They will come along and they will say: “We need certainty of contract so that we can invest in the expensive equipment needed for this new, grand CCO.” It will be a 30-year contract, and the local authority will not be able to get out of it for 30 years. That is not local democracy. That is wrong, and, indeed, I think there is a need for controls on the length of these cross-council contracts with independent private providers of CCO services. If you are going to have a 30-year contract in favour of Fulton Hogan or Downer or any other contractor, how does a future council effectively exercise democracy if it thinks that that decision of a prior council was wrong? You should not be able to bind a future council for ever, and you certainly should not, through the Local Government Commission, be able to force that on councils.
There were lots of other complaints made about this by councils but, essentially, that lies at the essence. Why does this Government not trust locally and democratically elected councils to do as they have done for the last 100 years and make sensible decisions for the people who elect them and the people who pay their rates?
SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2). It must be time for the retiring members of the Local Government and Environment Committee to round off the debate, following Mr Parker. I too was on the committee. While I was on the committee, Mr Parker did often speak a lot of sense, however, in regard to that contribution I must absolutely disagree.
This bill is about creating a framework to be improved, to create flexibility, and to allow councils to think laterally about how best to manage their infrastructure and services, and how best to manage complex issues moving forward. We can see that the issues facing especially the regions are quite diverse now, as we face issues such as depopulation and, obviously, providing essential services, without the rating base. So councils do have to think laterally about how to solve those problems and to think about driving regional development forward with, of course, the support of the Government.
This bill allows that. It is a “no obligation” way forward to look at the benefits of council-controlled organisations (CCOs). What this bill allows is for several councils in a region to come together and pool their resources to effectively manage infrastructure or services moving forward. This is the case in Southland. The members opposite have ranted and raved about the disadvantages of amalgamation, and that debate too is going on in Southland. There are very much people who do not want to see our four councils amalgamated, and there is the opposing view of people who want to see those four councils brought together as one.
However, what those councils have done is that—in the past they have always worked together, but as we have continued to develop our regional strategy, they are looking to formalise that relationship as to how to drive the goals of the action plan forward. A CCO is mentioned. Why is a CCO mentioned? It is because these governance arrangements allow the right people to be put in the right job to deliver results, and often elected officials do not necessarily have the appropriate skills to do that. So this is about allowing a flexible framework and one that improves the framework to deliver the best results. I am very pleased to commend this bill to the House.
The question was put that the amendments recommended by the Local Government and Environment Committee by majority be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the question be agreed to.
Ayes 60
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.
Noes 59
New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.
Question agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.
Ayes 60
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.
Noes 59
New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.
Bill read a second time.
Bills
Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill
Second Reading
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children): I move, That the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill be now read a second time. I want to begin by acknowledging the Social Services Committee for its thorough consideration of the bill. I also want to acknowledge the many individuals, organisations, and iwi who made submissions, and particularly the iwi leaders group, who, of course, now support the bill. The committee received over 440 written submissions and nearly 100 submitters were heard in oral hearings. It is very encouraging to see such strong public engagement, and it demonstrates our country’s commitment to securing better outcomes for its children.
Making sure that every child is in a safe, stable, and loving home requires all of us, in every community, to protect and support our children. It also requires all of us to listen. As I have said many times in this House, this Government is committed to ensuring that our most vulnerable children and young people are at the centre of every decision made about them. They deserve to have a voice, and they absolutely deserve to be listened to.
This bill seeks to provide the foundations for a child-centred care and protection and youth justice system, and will support the core services of the Ministry for Vulnerable Children, Oranga Tamariki through a series of wide-ranging reforms. These changes signal a significant shift from a focus on crisis response, and as we embark on this transformation over the next 4 to 5 years we will see a much greater emphasis on prevention, early intervention, and transition support to independence. This shift towards prevention and early intervention is a key tenet of the child-centred approach, and this Government expects that investing earlier in whānau and families and supporting them to stay together will mean that fewer children end up in State care. I would hope that all members in this House share this ambition.
The bill also provides a framework for young people to transition to independence. As any parent knows, young people often need a bit of extra help as they start to make their way in the world. It does not matter whether they are starting university, a new course, or their first job—the role of any parent is to be there and support them while they begin to stand on their own two feet. That is why new provisions in this bill will allow young people to remain with, or return to, a caregiver up to the age of 21, with the ability to grant additional advice and assistance up to age 25.
I want to take this opportunity today to address the noise that has been swirling around this bill. Before it was even introduced, people were discussing what these changes would mean and how they would affect families. Some of this discussion raised legitimate issues and concerns; some of it was little more than mischievous misinformation. The amount that has been written and debated on this topic has been quite eye-opening. It has shown me two things. First, this is a topic that New Zealanders rightly care about with great passion, and that is encouraging. Less encouraging, however, is that in a number of cases adult agendas appear to have been placed above the best interests and needs of the child. This has been very frustrating for me as I have always said to my Youth Advisory Panel, who have fed into this work, that my primary focus for this bill was to ensure that children and young people have a voice and a say in what is happening to them. I made a promise to them to cement that into legislation.
Over the last 3 months I have travelled the country meeting a large number of iwi, Māori organisations, and community groups to discuss this bill. As I have said, it is an issue that many New Zealanders care about, so I wanted to talk with as many groups as I could, face to face, to explain what we are trying to achieve and how this bill is an important step along that path. I have to say these meetings were really enlightening. In every meeting I met dedicated, passionate people who want the best for their families, whānau, communities, and iwi. They are people with an unwavering focus on ensuring children have the best possible opportunities and the best support should the State need to get involved, and these are people who overwhelmingly support making sure we work together sooner so we can prevent children needing to leave their families.
We had a number of incredibly valuable discussions about the role of whānau and family in a child’s life. I strongly believe that as long as a child’s or young person’s wishes and best interests are respected and they are safe, the best place for any child is with their family or whānau. My profound hope is that effective prevention and early intervention will see fewer children needing State care and more children living in safe, stable, and loving homes with families that are their own.
I accept that in the initial draft of this bill this intention was not as clear as it could have been, and I am heartened to see the select committee agreed with the recommendation to clarify the wording around this to align with the original intent. These changes now better set up the bill’s original intention—that where it is safe and in their best interests, children who are removed from their usual caregiver are returned home whenever possible, and, that where they cannot be returned home, and it is consistent with their best interests, there is a preference for a placement within their wider family, whānau, hapū, or iwi. We know no child exists in isolation, which is why there is an increase in prominence to the concepts of mana tamaiti, whakapapa, and whanaungatanga. This recognises that all children have their own intrinsic worth and that they sit as part of a wider group. It acknowledges that they are part of their own immediate family unit as well as their wider family group, community, culture, and genealogy. These layers give the young person an identity, a place, and a sense of belonging.
The State must unequivocally and unapologetically have high aspirations for any child who comes into its care, which is why a number of changes to care support provisions have been made. These changes will ensure that children get the special protection and assistance they so rightly deserve, whether physical or emotional. They will also address children’s healthcare, education, and other day-to-day needs, and will support them to fulfil their aspirations and developmental potential. It is not enough to protect our most vulnerable. We must give them what they need to live happy, healthy, and successful lives.
The committee has also recommended some changes to youth justice provisions, one of which is to allow 17-year-olds who have been transferred to adult courts to be transferred back to the Youth Court when the charges against them are reduced.
This Government is committed to honouring the voices of the many children and young people who have told us what they want to see in the future care and protection and youth justice system. These legislative changes are just one part of the Government’s response. Through strategic partnering, a trauma-informed practice framework, wider engagement with communities, and better support for families, whānau, and caregivers we will build on these changes so we can establish a truly child-centred system. Ultimately, this is what is needed to help ensure vulnerable children and young people have the best chance to have happy childhoods, be resilient, develop a sense of belonging and identity, and grow into flourishing adults.
I want to finish with what I consider an important signal. Earlier this year I wrote to the committee and asked them to consider changing the name of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act. I am very happy to confirm that the committee has proposed renaming it the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989. This change represents the aspirations we hold for New Zealand’s vulnerable children—that their well-being and voice are at the centre of all we do. We must listen to our children and young people, which is why I hereby commend the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill to the House.
Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato): I stand to speak to the second reading and just register that Labour is unable to support this bill. It takes a village to raise a child, and when we think about that, we think about the ecosystem within which a child is raised. While I acknowledge the speech—it appeared heartfelt—by the Minister for Children in terms of the approach to revamp Child, Youth and Family, you cannot look at legislative change in isolation from all the other aspects that impact on the vulnerabilities that many of the children who we are here today to speak about are currently facing. I so want to support a bill that will put children and their whānau at the centre of better legislation and that also improves policy decisions for long-term outcomes and strengthens the capacity of our community and voluntary sector to be funded well, which is where, actually, many of our families are seeking support and help at an early stage. It has to go hand in hand in order to work well.
But I want to come back to the recommendations of the Social Services Committee. Really, if you are just entering this debate, you will already know that the bill as introduced was poorly consulted on and there was a lot of noise, concern, angst, heartfelt emotion about the way in which there was a lack of consultation amongst community groups in social service sectors, which are critically impacted by the way in which this legislation would have an impact.
New section 4, inserted by clause 6, outlines the legislation’s purposes. If I were to summarise some of those main aspects, it seems that part of the purpose ensures that there will be a change in purchasing services by Child, Youth and Family, in terms of investing in opportunities for young people. That is untested. There is a social investment approach, but it is still at its very early stages and it is unclear what that will mean for the community and voluntary sector, which is contributing to supporting young people, and what those contracting arrangements will look like. Intervention supports for young people—while we do have a youth justice system that is critically geared towards stopping young people going into the adult justice system, at a community level there is significant underfunding of community-based services at an intervention level for young people to then be leading a positive alternative pathway, rather than a path of offending.
There is also a support there for strengthening whānau. Many of us will know in our communities we have supports around this area that are geared towards supporting whānau—whānau that are presenting with vulnerabilities. But they will tell you, time and time again, that their service can only be bolstered by the way in which other core aspects and access to stable circumstances can be achieved, such as housing. Many of the families that we are talking about are actually critically affected by the way in which other Government ministries are applying policy for housing. Instability actually leads to vulnerability, in housing, and, often, some of the kids we are talking about are picked up simply because they are living in cars and not in homes.
There is another aspect to this, which is the external environment. Really, it is on more of an aspirational level, but I want to comment on it because when we look at new section 4(1)(d) inserted by clause 6, and the provisions following—they are all the way in which it appears the Government wants to look towards partnering with other organisations and iwi, which is often held to be the opportunity here. Iwi have innovated a response in this space out of necessity, because they see the long-term need to ensure that more young people are not being picked up by the State and critically impacted on. The Government really has not had ability to impact on that environment except to look at that innovation and then gain from it. I simply make these comments because if the Government is seeking to ensure that it has a methodology around long-term impacts for our children, the legislation, as well as the way in which the Government is making investments around building the community and voluntary social sector, as well as supporting whānau—they all have to go hand in hand.
I want to comment on the definition of “mana tamaiti”. While I did not sit on the substantial parts of this bill during the committee’s considerations, the conversation around “mana tamaiti” and the broadening of its definition was, I think, in fact useful. The way in which the committee wanted to ensure that the intrinsic whakapapa, whanaungatanga connections of the tamaiti, the tamariki, were being considered broadened what was a very limited definition in the bill.
I want to comment on a couple of other things. The Minister spoke around transitioning to independence, on which there is some commentary in the bill and some changes. We are really wanting to acknowledge that it is important to address this area and the way in which young people who have had traumatic placements may perhaps take longer to move into independence. The bill provides for that kind of reality. There is opportunity, we believe, to further support the way in which these people, as they move into independence, can be supported through counselling and therapeutic support. That is a really important point, and it is something that, in my brief stint when I was Minister for Youth—there were young people whom we consulted with who had been in long-term care. The systemic impact on and damage that it had caused them, and then to get further lifetime opportunities—this was a key area for them, so we want to make sure that it is really an important element.
We support the requirement of the State to ensure that there are State-funded legal representatives for young people. However, the critical time for that to occur is in the first 24 hours for young people, and it makes all the difference. We only need to read about situations where young people have been uplifted and put into police cells to see how damaging that can be. So that critical point of providing legal support is absolutely crucial.
In terms of advocacy, we believe that advocacy makes, again, a critical difference to improving decisions made for young people, but when we look at the sustainable funding of organisations like VOYCE, we are left wondering whether there is a high ambition to put children at the centre if, again, we are not funding at the other end.
There is so much to speak about on this bill, and while there was some attention paid to the name change of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, which is a good thing, the actual practice is something far different. Oranga Tamariki is about the well-being of children, and if you are looking at the well-being of children, you are looking at children from a strength-based belief, in which culture, identity, and language critically matter. However, Treasury modelling of supports in Oranga Tamariki is based on a series of vulnerabilities, so it will have four or five vulnerabilities that are identified to be able to target communities and areas that it will invest funding into. If you want long-term outcomes for children, that is not the way to be making investment decisions about where best to ensure that you are supporting the infrastructure and the ecosystem—the village—around the communities that these children come from.
I would hazard a guess that if the Government really wanted to reform this particular sector, it should look at the opportunities to strengthen the environment of children and the communities they are growing up in, and get Government agencies to talk together in ways in which we can create greater stability. Housing would be a start. Housing would be a start, because if our kids are living in a secure home and a warm home, that is just one of many but a critical difference that could be invested in to improve the outcomes for many of the children who are impacted on by this legislation.
We would like to try to support the legislation, but it is difficult to because legislation does not occur in a vacuum. It has to be supported by really important investment decisions in other areas. So with those few comments, we register our continued concern about this bill.
JOANNE HAYES (National): I rise to take a call in the second reading of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill. I want to thank Minister Anne Tolley for the work that she has done to get to the place where we are at today—to get the bill to where it is. The Minister and her team have worked very hard to consult widely, from the top of the North to the bottom of the South, and from the East to the West.
They went out to consult a wide range of organisations, including Iwi Leaders Forum, on the parts within this bill. As I understand it, that was one of the most challenging hui, as the Minister and her team listened carefully to what the Iwi Leaders Forum had to say. Along with my colleagues on this side, I was very pleased when the result was that the Iwi Leaders Forum, with the changes made in this bill, said it would come and support this bill.
The other group that I also want to thank for getting this bill to where it is now are our members on the Social Services Committee. We all worked hard. We had our raruraru in the select committee, but we were able to come together and agree on the report, albeit the Labour Opposition members are opposing it.
We all know that this is the biggest reform in 30 years for Child, Youth and Family, and the bill proposes a number of things. It allows young people to remain in care, or return to care, up to the age of 21, and be able to transition from care up to the age of 25. That is really important, because that is what a group of young people whom we heard from said. They came from the Youth Advisory Panel to the Minister to discuss how they had been left out. We also heard from those young people through the Youth Advisory Panel, who said that at times there was always an assumption that they should return to their whānau, when some of them said that they did not want to return to their whānau.
So this bill had to be able to cater for those who wanted to return to their whānau and for those who did not want to return to their whānau, who did not want to return because they still felt vulnerable and felt at risk there. Centring this bill on children and young people was the best thing to do for the way forward. I really do have to applaud the Minister and the team that she worked with and the advisers, and I applaud the panel of youth who gave that advice on the way that this bill was going to actually work for them.
I think that extending the youth justice system to include lower-risk 17-year-olds was also a gap that was found in the review of the legislation, and so we were able to extend it out to 16. We had just a couple of submissions that said that they did not want that to happen. But we, as a committee, said “No, no. This is where we will go with this.”, and we listened to the argument.
So, as I said before, the bill actually places children at the centre—children at the centre. I heard in another contribution just before that it was children and whānau, but they are actually children. They are the most precious things in our lives. They are our future. It is our responsibility to make sure that they are safe, and this bill does that for those young people who are at risk.
I want to extend my thanks to the 442 interested groups and individuals who took the time to submit to the select committee, and to the 98 individuals and organisations that came along and gave oral submissions to us. They were very interesting and very thought-provoking, and I just want to extend my thanks to them.
So, without any further ado, I am very proud and very pleased to commend the bill to the House. Kia ora.
LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. It is my pleasure to speak on the second reading of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill. I want to commend Jo Hayes as the chair of the Social Services Committee. It was an intense process. I sat in on the committee a couple of times. So I want to acknowledge the 314 submissions and the 98 oral submissions, and also just highlight, from the Children’s Commissioner’s submission, that the relevance of this bill is to over 60,000 children who are captured within our care and protection and youth justice systems every year. Sixty-one percent of the children in the care and protection system are Māori and, unfortunately, 71 percent of the youth justice residency clients are Māori. So this bill is incredibly relevant to Māori, and I will explain our continued opposition to this legislation.
But before I do that, I just want to highlight some positives. I agree with the Minister for Children that the name change of this bill to the Oranga Tamariki Act or the Children’s and Young People’s Well-being Act is fantastic, and so I am hoping there will be no more references to the Ministry for Vulnerable Children. I also want to acknowledge the gender-neutral language within this bill that, along with that, highlights and recognises a child or young person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Finally, I do want to commend the Minister and the committee for the references to whānau, hapū, and iwi that are in the bill, because they had been removed and, presumably, that is the basis on which the iwi leaders are now supporting it.
However, I will read you the first sentence of Labour’s minority report under “Consideration of whānau, iwi, and hapū”. We said: “Labour made it very clear from the outset that we could not support a bill that removed the ‘whanau first’ principle as set out in section 13(2)(g) of the principal Act.” And I am going to read it, because it is relevant—section 13(2)(g) says: “where a child or young person cannot remain with, or be returned to … family, whanau, hapu, iwi, and family group, the principle that, in determining the person in whose care the child or young person should be placed, priority should, where practicable, be given to a person—(i) who is a member of the child’s or young person’s hapu or iwi (with preference being given to hapu members), or, if that is not possible, who has the same tribal, racial, ethnic, or cultural background as the child or young person;”. And that is the relevance of our opposition to this bill.
I have tried to find out where this particular prioritisation of children being returned to hapū and iwi if their family, for whatever reason, cannot care for them is in this piece of legislation, and I cannot find it. I am sorry, but I cannot find it. And I would like to highlight new section 4(1)(e) inserted by clause 6: “ensuring that, where children and young persons require care under the Act, they have—(i) a safe, stable, and loving home from the earliest opportunity; and (ii) support to address their needs:”. Where is the reference to—and this is where I would put it, in (e)(i)—a safe, stable, and loving home within whanaunga and hapū and iwi from the earliest opportunity? If that was in this piece of legislation, we possibly would support it, but it is not there.
Why is this a huge issue for us? Actually, it is an issue because the Government has a duty of care. And what is that duty of care? That duty of care, which is a legal obligation and responsibility, is to safeguard children and young people from harm while they are in the care of Oranga Tamariki or Child, Youth and Family—whatever we are going to call it.
I want to highlight the Canadian experience, and it is incredibly relevant. So in February this year, the Canadian court, after an 8-year class action suit, had given $1.3 billion to 16,000 Ontario aboriginal children who were placed in non-aboriginal homes between 1965 and 1984. It was under federal provincial agreement. And what the court has said is that the federal Government breached its duty to take reasonable steps to prevent the children from losing their aboriginal identity.
One of the quotes from a plaintiff in the case—“We were black kids with the intention by the Government to make us white.” The findings were that these children lost their identity, which led to mental disorders, substance abuse, and drug and alcohol abuse, which led to cycles of incarceration and suicide. So the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs in Canada, Carolyn Bennett, said that the Government will not appeal that decision. It really is highlighting that in Canada it was called the “60s swoop”. In Australia it is called “the stolen generation”, and so I think that our Minister and our Government, given 61 percent of the children in care are Māori, do have a duty to ensure that our Māori children do not lose their Māori identity by being placed in the system.
It also corresponds, from my perspective, to new section 5(1)(b) inserted by clause 8: “the well-being of a child or young person must be at the centre of decision making that affects that child or young person,”. And then it references the child or young person’s rights according to UNCROC, which is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 8 of that convention is that the child has the right to the preservation of their identity, and State parties must preserve their nationality, their name, and their family relations, which, as defined in this bill, is their whakapapa and their kinship. The State also has a duty to help children regain any identity that has been taken away from them.
There is hope in this bill, because under new section 7AA(1) inserted by clause 12, which outlines the duties of the chief executive in relation to Tiriti o Waitangi, there is an opportunity for the preservation of identity, in that part of the legislation. It is specifically in new section 7AA (2)(c) where “the department seeks to develop strategic partnerships with iwi and Māori organisations, including iwi authorities, in order to—”. And here is where it gets really interesting. Nowhere in that list of relationships does it commit the Minister and the CEO of Oranga Tamariki to explore the relationship with hapū and iwi, and our rights and responsibilities in the development of the polices, the practices, and the services that Oranga Tamariki will deliver. That is the guts of the issue, because, as has been highlighted by the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services in its submission: “At the heart of the contention of this bill is the assumption that the 1989 Act … it represented, has failed Māori tamariki. In contrast, our members tell us the 1989 legislation is not the issue but rather its application in practice,”.
What it says is that the practice—the institutional racism of Child, Youth and Family—has failed to honour the bicultural intent of the legislation. That continues to remain the big challenge for our support of this legislation, and we will continue to fight against the system that erodes and strips Māori children’s identities away from them, because what happened in Canada—children ending up in prison—is exactly what has happened in Aotearoa New Zealand. There are high rates of mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction. A lot of the people who are living on our streets who are homeless—the most vulnerable members of our society—have been a product of this racist system, and this legislation does not address that issue. That is why we will not support this bill. We are not shameful, as the Minister said when she left this House. She said shame on us. Well, I actually say shame on you, because you have not addressed the issues that have created so much disorder.
STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill. I think it is a fantastic step forward, and it really comes out of the expert panel’s report on modernising Child, Youth and Family, which was released in April of last year. Some very strong words came from the previous speaker, Louisa Wall, and I admire her passion. I do not agree, but I admire her passion.
That report found quite clearly that the child was not at the centre of the legislation, and that was a major part of the discussion. I was not involved with this bill all the way through, but I did sit on the Social Services Committee for a good part of its consideration, and there was a lot of passionate discussion. I would like to take an opportunity to acknowledge the Hon Hekia Parata, who, on that committee, made an invaluable contribution around definitions and so on, and the language. It really highlighted to me what a terrific loss, what a tremendous loss we are going to have in this Parliament when she leaves after the election. I pay tribute to her because she has been a fantastic Minister of Education, as everyone knows—probably one of the best ever. But to see her contribution in other areas—my admiration has grown significantly since sitting on that committee with her.
One of the earlier speakers said it takes a village to raise a child, and I totally agree with that, but we must do that in a way that will ensure that when that child comes under State purview, they are in a safe and loving home and environment. To not do that is really to abdicate the role of the State to give that child a chance at a happy childhood and to grow up through that. They are not going to be torn away from their cultural identity. In fact, we spent hours on that very point to ensure that it was covered in the legislation and around the words. It seems legal definitions are things that people can get quite het up about, but the language has to be clear, and in my belief it is clear in this bill. This is about keeping children at the centre of this legislation and ensuring that they have a fair crack at life and can maintain their cultural identity and roots. It is with great pleasure that I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.
JAN LOGIE (Green): It is with a heavy heart that I rise to speak on this bill, the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill, at second reading. You know, this is incredibly important legislation. It is legislation whose intent is to protect children in this country, and I am sure that protection of our kids is dear to the heart of every single member of this Parliament. It is our duty, as members of Parliament, particularly, to be interested in the well-being of our children. They have no ability to vote, so that puts a particular onus on us to be looking out for their interests; often they do not even get a voice in the process, and hardly did, and nor do they get directly to us as the Social Services Committee.
I just want to express how profoundly upset I am at the Government screwing this up so badly that this is probably going to pass with one vote. This legislation that should have every single person in this House in support of it, because it is so important, is going to just get through. The Government did not consult and did not listen, and the issues that it is trying to pretend do not exist in this legislation have not been addressed, despite some progress through the committee.
The Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act was introduced in 1989, and for many years after that people came from all over the world to look at how our child protection and youth justice system was working, and many countries have looked to us for leadership because of that piece of legislation. I am not in any way saying that the way it has been implemented has been perfect. We have just heard from the last speaker, Stuart Smith, actually, about some of the challenges that we are facing, but the problem we heard from submitter after submitter is not fundamentally with the legislation. Of course, there are things—since we signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—that needed updating in this legislation, and we certainly could have got behind legislation that did that. But it is such a shame that, actually, this legislation does not even make us compliant with those conventions. It goes some way—some way—and then puts in some massive structural changes that risk the good things in the system, which could work really well if they were properly resourced.
As for the, you know, comments that people are actually supportive of this, I do just want to quote some of the submitters and the comments that were made about the legislation as it was first introduced. It was variously described as “a dog’s breakfast”, “more confusing”, “taking us back to the 1950s”, “a tractor rolling over Māori”, and “poorly drafted, poorly thought-through and consulted”. I do acknowledge that there has been some significant improvement in the legislation from the bill that was first introduced, particularly around provisions for protection of tamariki Māori and their cultural identity. But even in that area, where there has been significant progress made, as Louisa Wall pointed out so eloquently previously, the key measures that we looked at to see whether the changes had got the bill over the line did not get it over the line. We do not, in this piece of legislation, have the assurance that when a tamariki Māori is removed from their whānau for their own protection they will then be placed into a whānau, hapū, or iwi home where they will be safe.
I did take offence in turn from the Minister saying in her opening speech that she had been offended by a sense that adult agendas were taking precedence over the needs of children. Well, for the people whom I heard presenting, that was not what their opposition was. This was not about adults’ needs; this was an acknowledgment that the well-being of our children is integrally tied up with their family. You cannot separate those things. If a family and the extended family is unwell, then the child will be unwell, regardless of whether they are living with them or not.
It is actually just fundamentally racist—to me—to suggest that children will not be safe, or could not in any instance be safe, within their extended whānau, hapū, or iwi. These are large groupings. The fault is, and the truth is, that the institution has not developed the systems to be able to work with iwi to find those safe places. Here we are punishing those children by virtue of suggesting that their families are not safe because the institution has not been resourced to be able to create that safety.
The history of racist practice within this institution has to be acknowledged. We heard it leading up to the development of the original legislation, and we heard it again through these submissions. It was heartbreaking to hear the stories that were presented to us about the loss and the hurt and the deep mistrust that has developed as a result of the Crown’s failure to protect tamariki Māori, which is kind of part of the burn of this. The sense that has been coming from this Government is that it is going to protect these children when Māori have failed, when the truth is that children have been taken from their families and put into State care and hurt, and that we have hurt those children by our failure to ensure that those systems were appropriate and looking out for those interests of those children and their whānau.
There are many things to be able to say about this bill, and I have run well over time already for the things I wanted to say. I did want to point out some of the things—an annoyance about where there is progress in this bill, and yet it does not go far enough. As an example: we support the—well, no, actually, I want to go to the information-sharing provisions, because this is a really critical point of our opposition to this bill.
One of the submissions was a note that the provisions were consulted on with the Privacy Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner opposed them, and yet they were brought before the committee and they have not been fundamentally changed at all, even though the Privacy Commissioner opposed these changes. The Hestia Rodney Women’s Refuge Māori Caucus submitters noted that they are seeing now that whānau are starting to lie to them because they are scared of losing their children. They also noted that women are often given an 0800 number to call if they are concerned for their safety, as victims of domestic violence, but they will not call it if Child, Youth and Family people are going to be called.
So this is not a side issue. This is central to ensuring that victims are able to protect themselves and their children, and that people who may represent a danger to their children are able to seek help early. We have to create a system that is going to work for them, and this legislation—we are also considering the Family and Whānau Violence Legislation Bill at the moment, which has alternative information-sharing provisions that actually contradict this. So, clearly, not even the Ministers are talking to each other, and who is going to fall through the cracks? It is our children, and we are risking them being in more harm after this legislation goes through.
DARROCH BALL (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill. New Zealand First will not be supporting it. There are a couple of reasons why. The first one—I will just mention it briefly—has already been covered quite a bit in the House by the Opposition. I think Louisa Wall stated it—that in general there is quite a lot of ambiguity about the way that the legislation is written and how it can be interpreted, especially on the ground.
What the Government needs to understand is that what is written in the legislation here, when it boils down to it, is just a bunch of words. Unless that gets translated into what happens on the ground, to ensure, obviously, that it is quite clear to a case worker or someone who is working with children on the ground what the priorities need to be, then it just will not work. It is going to be an especially interesting process as we go through the Committee stage and look at those different paragraphs and clauses in the legislation and see exactly how the Government will attempt to change those with amendments.
The second point that I wanted to make, which I want to spend the majority of my time on, is something that does not actually get debated often in this House, especially through the process of this legislation. I believe that is because New Zealand First stands alone on this, and that is that we oppose any move of the youth justice system to include 17-year-olds. Unfortunately, that is actually included in this legislation, and because it is not mentioned often, or at all—I noticed that the Minister for Children did not mention it at all, and I think only Joanne Hayes mentioned it once—I believe that it gets missed, but it is quite important, and it is essential that we speak about the reasoning behind why the Government wants to change it and why that reasoning is flawed.
I just wanted to point out something. It is quite an interesting fact that in 2008 when the National Party was in Opposition the change to the youth justice system to include 17-year-olds was already on the table in the House here, and it was put there by the Labour Government. National Party members stood up and said that if they supported this change to the youth justice age to include 17-year-olds, people would think that National members were a bunch of wusses. They stood up and said that 16- and 17-year-olds should be treated like the adults that they are, because of the adult crimes that they commit. What a flip-flop we have. In fact, in 2008 John Key campaigned on being tough on crime, and especially on youth crime. Look at how far the National Party has come from where it was—this bill shows that as an actual, demonstrable, and tangible fact.
The fact is that this legislation will introduce 17-year-olds—more young people—into a failing youth justice system. What we hear is really pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, from both sides of the House now, about how the youth justice system is the best in the world, how the youth justice system is working, how the youth justice system benefits young people, and how it is a lot better than the adult system. That is demonstrably not true. What we hear from the Minister every time I ask her a question, and what we hear from all of the submitters, including the Children’s Commissioner, is that they have got evidence and proof that the youth justice system will be better for 17-year-olds—and that is just not true at all.
Talking about just the court system, this legislation wants to have the lower end of the 17-year-olds who offend move into the youth justice system and the Youth Court. If we talk about just the Youth Court, we know that the Youth Court currently has an 80 to 90 percent reoffending rate—an 80 to 90 percent reoffending rate—and that is not even talking about how those young people got to the Youth Court in the first place and how that is failing them with the Police Alternative Action. Now what this Government wants to do is include more young people in that. The Youth Crime Action Plan a couple of years ago came out and said that it was going to steer away from building more youth residence beds. What did this Government just say it was going to do this year? Add 54 more. This youth justice system is not working. It is failing those young people.
The most important part is that for some strange reason the Government is portraying the 17-year-olds who will be included in the youth justice system as the one-time offenders, the 17-year-olds who make mistakes. That is just simply not true. The majority of the 17-year-olds who will be dealt with in the Youth Court are the ones who have been recidivist, high-level offenders when they were 14, 15, and 16. The Police Association in its submission said as much. That is what it said. I asked the Police Association whether, if this change was to be implemented, it would reduce youth crime. There was only a one-word answer, and that was “No”. The Police Association said no, it would not.
Now we have had Mr Nash standing up on this side of the House through question time over the last couple of days and talking about the Police Association and about all of the surveys and why the Minister is not listening. Well, the Police Association survey showed that front-line police, 75 percent of them, did not want the Youth Court age to change—75 percent of them. But the Labour Party backs this change in the Youth Court jurisdiction. Fifty-five percent—the majority—of the police officers who are youth aid officers and work with young offenders can see that this change will not make a difference for them, and, in fact, will make it worse.
I just want to spend a couple of minutes going through the evidence—the evidence that this National Government and the Minister gave me through Official Information Act requests and written questions and through the submission process. I asked a simple question. The Minister stood up in this House and said there is evidence and proof that 17-year-olds would be better off in the youth justice system, and I said: “Well, give me the proof.” These papers I am holding are the stuff that the National Government and the ministries have given me as the justification for why they have changed it. This is their evidence.
By the way, the majority of it, if not all of it, is American. This is all based on American studies with the American justice system—what a comparison. All of the data that is in here comes from the 1980s and 1990s, and some of the actual research was printed in 2007 or earlier. Members opposite, when in Opposition, did not want to change the situation when they had this evidence. When they read through this evidence, they did not want change. Now National Government members are using the same evidence to change it. It is utter lunacy. It is just lunacy.
The first bit of evidence is about arrest and its effects on juveniles, and I have highlighted a few points. This is the evidence that the Minister has given me to justify the change in the youth justice area. It was found that between the group of youth for whom there was a police decision to charge and a match-controlled group, there was no significant difference in the prevalence of frequency of subsequent serious delinquency. That was one of the points.
The second is from a study on the effects on violence of laws and policies facilitating the transfer of youth to the adult system. It says that over the longer term there was reduced recidivism for some juveniles and increased recidivism for others. That means the transferred youth sometimes decreased in their recidivism and sometimes it was up. There are inconsistencies with which this Government is using its research.
It shows here that they found that the transfer of juveniles, initially arrested for property crimes, was associated with a decrease in recidivism. Moving up to the adult court ended up in a decrease in recidivism. Another study, a meta-analysis of restorative diversion systems, says that while the first study found that youth diversion programmes were more effective than traditional judicial intervention at reducing recidivism, the second found no effects of diversion programmes on recidivism.
This is all of the evidence that was given to me to prove and justify the Government’s reasoning for reducing the youth justice age. At best, this information and these studies are mixed. They are non-comparable with the New Zealand judicial system, and they simply cannot be used as proof or evidence, but that is what this Government has been trying to do.
It is going to be interesting to see this legislation progress through the different stages in the House, especially through the Committee stage. I would just like to reiterate that New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill for the reasons that I have covered. Thank you.
JONO NAYLOR (National): I would just like to begin where the last speaker, Darroch Ball, left off, because I think it is really important that we do spend a little bit of time and focus on the youth justice aspects of this piece of legislation. While, yes, there were some submitters—the Police Association and others—who did not like the idea of having 17-year-olds go through the youth justice system, we also had a submission from the Children’s Commissioner, who, of course, used to be the Principal Youth Court Judge, who absolutely believed that our young offenders would be better suited to go through that system. I would also like to remind the House that, actually, not every 17-year-old will go through that system. Serious crimes, as they are now, even for 13- and 14-year-olds, can still be treated through the adult justice system. So there was a little bit of scaremongering in the previous speech, which was a little ill-founded.
I just want to talk about the fact that it is a real privilege that we sometimes get in this House to be able to—well, actually, all the time—do things that are going to help make people’s lives better. I want to commend the Hon Anne Tolley for bringing this legislation forward to actually make a step change in the way that we are now treating and going to relate to some of the most vulnerable people in New Zealand—that is, the children and young people who require the care and protection of the State.
The bill came to us in very good shape. It was well intentioned, with some great things in place. But it was also very good to be able to go through what I consider was a very thorough and well-considered select committee process, where we heard from a number of submitters around some of the concerns they had, and, particularly, we have had reference from the iwi leaders group and other people who suggested that, perhaps, we needed to make some better descriptors and have some more robust descriptions of some of the things that particularly affect Māori children.
Far be it from me, as a tauiwi New Zealander, to actually comment on definitions of Māori words, but I think what is really important is the concept of mana tamaiti that actually runs through this bill, which is that we will actually recognise the mana of the individual child. We always used to have the paramountcy clause, but I think what is really important is that within the definition of “mana tamaiti” that is now embodied within this legislation in clause 4(1)—and I want to read it out. It says this: “mana tamaiti”—and, of course, tamariki in the multiple—“and the child’s or young person’s well-being should be protected by recognising their whakapapa and the whanaungatanga responsibilities of their family, whānau, hapū, iwi, and family group:”.
There has been a lot of talk in this House today about how this legislation does not actually give enough credence to children within the wider context of their whānau, hapū, and iwi. I think that within even the definition of “mana tamaiti” that I have just talked about—there are good definitions in there about whakapapa and whanaungatanga as well, which ensures, I believe, that we have got the processes in place to ensure that the mana of those children is preserved within the context of their whānau, hapū, and iwi. With that, I want to commend this bill to the House.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. Marama Davidson—5 minutes.
MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): As my colleague Jan Logie said, the Green Party will not support the children, young persons, and their families legislation, and I struggle to call it the full title—Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill—which includes Te Reo words “Oranga Tamariki”, because it just does not fit, and submitters told us so as well.
In the second reading, I too recall that 61 percent of tamariki who are in the care of the State are Māori. So for that reason what is being proposed in this legislation is incredibly important to Māori communities. I particularly want to go into the guise of using the phrase, which sounds very popular and very heartfelt—“putting children first”.
If we recall, my colleague Louisa Wall alone reminded us that we can search as hard as we like through the bill and we will not find the priority for tamariki to be placed with whānau, hapū Māori—iwi Māori. That aside, even with the fact that that priority is not in this legislation—and that is the core of some of the big opposition from the Green Party to this bill—we can just go back to the Minister for Children’s opening address on the second reading, where she herself continues to use “children first” as the exploitative excuse for failing to keep that priority of placing tamariki Māori with whānau Māori. That is what she continues to use.
That feeds a racist narrative. That feeds a racist narrative that undermines the care that Māori whānau have always sought to uphold the well-being of tamariki. It feeds a narrative of the failure of social workers, of the failure of the system to provide support to ensure that everything is being done to find those available, safe, whānau Māori. So I really want to address those particular points. It flies in the face of the State’s own history of abusing tamariki Māori—generations of it. Generations of it—right back to the time when my own grandmother was physically and psychologically beaten for speaking her own language. The State has generations, hundreds of years, of experience of abusing tamariki Māori in its care. There is no other word for that except systemic racism.
So, with that, we should know, then, that this guise of “children first” is a continuation of that racist attitude, which says Māori children are better placed by the State. We have been doing that here and around the world to indigenous children for hundreds of years. So it is very important that I wanted to address that particular notion in this legislation. The submissions were very clear to us that there is no excuse for undermining the ability for Māori as a solution, providing good, safe care for tamariki Māori.
One of the submitters, Paora Crawford Moyle, says that part of the problem is that we are trying to fix a practice failure with a legislative solution, and that is not going to do it. What needs to instead be addressed is the institutional racism, and that is what we should be looking at, alongside the strength-based approaches and steps that would see whāngai—a cultural approach of Māori for decades, for generations—as a strength. Whāngai is the ability for other whānau Māori to step up and care for other children, which we have been doing forever as a core part of addressing the well-being of tamariki.
There is an opportunity there if we stop being culturally incompetent in this House. There is an opportunity to draw on a strength practice that is still used today in a modern context, and has been used for generations. This is where our opportunity lies. So I wanted to stand up and say Māori have the answers and the solutions to the problems, and we need to be worked with in proper partnership. Thank you.
PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. First of all, I would just like to thank Anita for her service and wish her all the best on her new journey ahead.
We have heard all of these nice words. We have heard that if you change the name it is a good start. The bottom line is that regardless of the words that you put into this particular bill, I support my colleague Marama Davidson in saying that, actually, it is the institution that is the problem. If the Minister for Children was brave and bold, she would address the pleas by many adults who came through a State ward system—the many adults who came through this particular system and are now asking for a royal inquiry into the treatment that they received in State care. If this Minister cared about it, we would address that and I am sure we would see many of the issues from a royal inquiry inform a better piece of legislation. At the moment, what we have is legislation that really only tinkers around the edges, really only acknowledges some parts of the wider problem, and, I feel, tries to put a coat of paint over what is a really big issue.
Take the wording “loving home” in the bill—I have seen those words right throughout the bill; “loving home”. How about this Government just provides our families with homes? That is a good start. There are no homes in this country for families. We have families sleeping in cars, and this particular bill is putting forward an expectation that we are going to provide loving homes. Of course we want to do that—of course—but let us be realistic. There is a housing crisis in this country, and families are out in the cold. If you look at some of the whānau who find themselves in those situations, they are not there because they choose to be; they are there because of a failure by this Government to actually address so many more issues that feed into this particular bill.
Scores of submissions were given on this bill, and I have heard commentary from the other side of the House about the types of submissions that were made and how long we have been waiting for such meaningful change. If only they had considered Pūao-te-ata-tū as a good foundation—the great work the group did and the report that was provided for the Government in the late 1980s. You will find a lot of answers there—a lot of answers.
As I read through this bill, it just does not quite match up to what was essentially a great piece of work that would see Māori culture at the forefront of service provision for our people—for our people, because, let us be honest, most of those tamariki in State care are from Ngāpuhi. Most of those tamariki in Tāmaki-makau-rau are from Ngāpuhi.
When I consider the provisions for strategic partnerships with Māori, I wonder just exactly how this Government expects people like Ngāpuhi—the tribe of Ngāpuhi, approximately 130,000-odd people, with no settlement—to actually be able to provide the care that we are hoping to give our tamariki. That is a real challenge and a real question, and I am sure, despite the language in this particular bill, that there are some realities out on the street—some very harsh realities. Those realities tell us that not all iwi, not all hapū, and not all whānau have the capacity to do that, despite the willingness to do it.
Those are some serious challenges that we put in front of this Government, to make sure that the language in this bill, the essence of this bill, and the intention of this bill are right so that we make sure that we address the problems and make sure that tamariki are in fact at the forefront of all we do. At the moment, the words I am hearing in this House—that is all it is; it is words. That is all it is—it is simple words.
On this side of this House it is with regret that we will not be supporting this bill. We have pointed out the reasons why, in our minority view. I am sure that as this bill progresses through its next stages in the House, there are going to be a lot of speakers from this side of the House, because this is important and we do want to get it right. Let us go through this with a fine-tooth comb. In closing my contribution, I reiterate that we will not be supporting this bill.
Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): I am taking this call to support the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill in its second reading.
Very quickly, before I talk about the bill, I would like to comment on two previous contributions. I heard them say that there were flaws in operating practices—and that is why we need this bill. We want to adopt a child-centred operating model. If they really believe that we should change our operating model, they should be supporting this bill. This bill has not come before the House just like that. There has been a lot of work done behind the scenes, before the bill has come before the House.
We know that this bill is partly a product of the expert panel that was set up by this Government in April 2015. I want to acknowledge the work that the Minister in charge of the bill, the Hon Anne Tolley, has done to bring this big transformation in the care and protection system.
About this bill—as we expected, there was a huge amount of interest in this bill, as we saw from the number of submissions. We had more than 400 submissions, and around 98 submitters appeared before the Social Services Committee for oral submissions too. Looking at other select committee processes, I thought this was a very lengthy process, so I want to also thank the committee staff for their support.
I want to acknowledge and thank all the submitters for taking this opportunity to have their views heard through the select committee process. Based on the responses that we received from various submitters—whether it was to fully support the bill, partially support the bill, express their concerns, or suggest amendments—the select committee has recommended a number of changes, which I believe will align the bill with the policy intent.
During the select committee process there was one common thing that came through, and that was that people were not happy with how the Child, Youth and Family system was delivering for children. Yes, there was concern for Māori children. But I have to say that I was not surprised, listening to those submitters, because that is what the expert panel said and that is what the Youth Advisory Panel said—the Youth Advisory Panel that was set up to advise the Minister, the Hon Anne Tolley.
We know that the expert panel consulted extensively with children, young people, parents, caregivers, and social workers who are involved in care and protection. Also, the bill has been consulted on, with several agencies. So listening to those submissions actually gives me more assurance that, definitely, we need this transformation of the care and protection system. That is why we want to adopt this child-centred approach. We want to adopt this child-centred operating model. We want to deliver better outcomes for Māori children. We also want to see that the services that are delivered to various agencies are delivered in a collaborative manner, so that we can deliver better outcomes for the children who come into State care.
Also, families should be getting the opportunity to get assistance at the earliest possible opportunity, so that they can provide for and also improve outcomes for children and young people. With this child-centred approach, consultation with children is very important in this bill. But the other thing that I want to highlight is that, yes, care and protection while children are in care is important, but the transition of children from care to independence is also important. The cut-off that we had before was not working, and that is why now we have this new provision, through this bill, that these young people will be able to come back to their caregiver, to live with them until the age of 21.
This is a big step, a very extensive step, and it is well supported by allocations in Budget 2016 and Budget 2017. I support this bill and commend it to the House. Thank you.
POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): The first thing I want to do is actually commend those dedicated women and men who have worked with our children in the previous format of Child, Youth and Family and who will go on to work with our kids in the new organisation, Oranga Tamariki. I do want to commend them because I believe that even now, despite the fact we are debating this bill and the Government is talking about ensuring much higher rates of practice and better practice, I do not believe that the Government will resource Oranga Tamariki to anywhere near the level that we expect to make any significant change for the outcomes of those children who come into State care. I want to acknowledge, celebrate, and commend those workers because they do a very difficult job, under some very difficult conditions.
My connection with what was Child, Youth and Family, and working with the legislation as it was, was as a community rep on the child protection review panel for the Waitakere site of Child, Youth and Family. I am going to reference a lot of what I say today in those terms, because I do not believe that we, under this legislation, will make significant change in some of the key areas that I believe we do need to.
In our minority report we make reference to the fact that we are removing the “whānau first” concept from our practice with our young children. Why is that significant? Why is that significant? It is because, in my view and my experience on that review panel, if you are a young woman Māori who is pregnant, you are twice—maybe three times—more likely to have Child, Youth and Family involvement before your baby is even born. If you are a parent who is involved in a family violence situation, and you are Māori, you are seven times, probably, more likely to be required to take out a protection order or to have services forced upon you or imposed upon you because you are Māori.
Working in Child, Youth and Family is working in an environment that is actually an institution of racism biased against Māori, and there is a lot of evidence that supports that. When we are looking at the language that this bill uses to ensure that it references work with Māori, it is actually pure tokenism because our languages—Te Reo Māori, Te Reo Kuki Airini, which is probably the parent language to Te Reo Māori—are conceptual languages, and the language that we use in legislation that supports our kids is actually conceptual language.
Recently, I spoke with a group of Cook Islands business people about the issue of climate change—and I am straying a little bit—and in that I talked about what happens to your whakapapa when you no longer have the whenua to connect that to. After I spoke, a Cook Islands leader came to me and said: “When you spoke about whakapapa, the concept of whakapapa to me is the preparation for the future. When you speak to a Pākehā person about whakapapa, they have a different concept of what that means, but in my Reo, whakapapa means preparation for the future.” So when we use the word in legislation, in this legislation, what we are saying is we are wanting to ensure that we prepare our children well for the future, and have we actually done that?
Oranga Tamariki, at the head of operations, has a CEO who is of Irish descent and a senior social worker who is Welsh. The senior social worker came here because of the work that Child, Youth and Family was doing around family group conferences—came here to learn how we did it better. And now this person is in charge of ensuring that our children—61 percent of the children who are involved in the service are Māori, and this person and the head of operations do actually not have a basic understanding of the concepts that they will be working with. I have a huge problem with that. Given we are trying to move the outcomes for our children into a positive space, we have people who do not have a basic understanding of those Māori concepts.
There was a lack of consultation with those workers who understand the issue best—not just social workers, but Māori social workers, those social workers who work with and are part of the hapū, the whānau, the iwi. For me that is also another major problem. If you are wanting to ensure that you are going to develop the best practice for your tamariki, you talk to the experts. You talk to the experts, and you ensure that their voice is heard.
Labour has a problem with how we place our children into the care of those who are not even the same nationality or ethnicity, and I want to share a story with you of a couple of friends of mine who, out of the goodness of their heart, wanted to become carers for children who have had a difficult start and come into State care. They put their names forward, they went through the police check process, they were waiting for some training, they were waiting for a whole lot of work to happen. They were about 2 or 3 months into a process that was going to take several months when they were not offered but actually given a young child to care for.
This young child was problematic because of their age and the types of issues that had happened to this young child. It became very problematic for them to continue with this young boy’s care. But the experience of this young boy, in his young life, having had several placements, was this huge disconnection—a huge disconnection. He was never connected to any real family, and he was problematic because he was always expecting to be moved on. That fed his behaviour. It became increasingly difficult for them to continue to have him, because he impacted on their own children.
But my point about that is that we invest an awful lot into these children, and into the placements, when we are not actually looking at how we support the family to keep them in the first place. When the issues actually occur in the first place, the families should be supported. I know you are shaking your head, but we are more likely to uplift children than we are to actually provide the resource for that family to keep that child safe.
Jono Naylor: That’s why we’re changing the legislation.
POTO WILLIAMS: The legislation will not work. When you take the “whānau first” concept out of the legislation, what are you saying? That is the point of the legislation, so you take the basic concept out? That is crackers. And this is what I am saying: you support the family to keep the children, and that will actually resolve a lot of the issues, because whakapapa is about preparing for the future, but it is also about ensuring that you remain connected to your history. When you destroy that, when you disrupt that, you cause problems into the future for that child.
Jono Naylor: No one wants to destroy it. Read the bill.
POTO WILLIAMS: You cause problems for that child. Words are words, Mr Naylor. Words are words; they are not actions. We have had problems for decades about this. So if the Government is so sure that it has got this right, then return the principle of “whānau first”. Return the principle—put it back in there—because that says, up front, that you are committed as a Government to ensure that whānau, and supporting whānau, is the most important aspect of care for a child.
So we will not be supporting this legislation, and we think that you have missed a huge opportunity as a Government to get this right. Thank you.
MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I commend this bill to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendments recommended by the Social Services Committee by majority be agreed to.
Ayes 60
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.
Noes 58
New Zealand Labour 30; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.
Question agreed to.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 60, Noes 56.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): We are in the voting process, and the Clerk has called for the vote. The phone call comes second.
Matt Doocey: Sorry, I did not hear the vote. Sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): We are voting on the motion, and the Clerk has called for parties to exercise their vote. I am asking the Clerk to start again.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill be now read a second time.
Ayes 60
New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.
Noes 58
New Zealand Labour 30; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.
Bill read a second time.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 60, Noes 56.
KRIS FAAFOI (Senior Whip—Labour): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Can I just clarify with you, Mr Assistant Speaker—I understand it is the right of the Māori Party not to vote—how that non-vote will be recorded?
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Well, it is not recorded. We are recording only those votes that are cast by the various parties. A party does not have to exercise its right to vote, and some abstain. Some parties may not wish to vote. So in this case the whip for the Government, who holds the proxies for various parties, has not exercised the right for the Māori Party, and that is quite proper.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It is just a minor point. I just want to check with you. It is normal practice when not all votes are cast for the Clerk to ask whether there are any other votes. Does that not apply when a party does not do that?
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The Clerk asked for the Māori Party vote. The Māori Party did not exercise its right. The whip, who usually holds the proxy vote for the Māori Party, did not exercise that right. So that point is covered.
JAMI-LEE ROSS (Senior Whip—National): Firstly, Mr Assistant Speaker, I must apologise. I came in part-way through, which is why I am breathing heavily from running. The situation was that the holder of the proxy vote—me—was asked not to exercise proxies from a certain time. We have since been advised that the Māori Party is able to exercise proxies, so I seek leave to cast two votes in favour of the bill that has just been passed and to have the vote amended.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection. I will ask the senior whip then—the vote. I will ask the Clerk to ask for the vote for the Māori Party, and I will ask the senior whip to exercise that right.
Members, the vote on the amendments recommended by the Social Services Committee is that the Ayes are 60 and the Noes are 58, so the amendments are agreed to. The vote on the second reading is that the Ayes are 60 and the Noes are 58, and the motion on the second reading is agreed to.
KRIS FAAFOI (Senior Whip—Labour): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. My understanding is that we have already voted and that the House can only correct a vote, not take the vote again, which I understand just happened.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No, the senior whip sought leave and there was no objection to the leave, and that is why I asked the Clerk to ask what the Māori Party’s vote was. We have had that, and I have now recorded what that vote was. There was leave sought. You could have objected to that, if you wished, but the senior whip did seek leave. So that is the end of the matter.
KRIS FAAFOI (Senior Whip—Labour): Sorry, but that was not my point. My point was that we had already progressed past the point where the bill had been read, so the vote could only be corrected, not taken again.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Well, no, by leave—I will just have to seek clarification. By leave—and I am correct in what I have done.
Bills
Enhancing Identity Verification and Border Processes Legislation Bill
Second Reading
Debate resumed from 22 June.
STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I wonder whether I am going to have time to draw breath. What I will say is that we are supporting the Enhancing Identity Verification and Border Processes Legislation Bill. This has arisen when that despicable character Phillip John Smith absconded from the country. We have got to remember that this is a guy who was convicted of paedophilia and then murdered someone. Luckily—
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.
Debate interrupted.
The House adjourned at 6 p.m.